Science journalism by Leonid Schneider, on research integrity and academic publishing in life sciences and biomedicine
This guest post by Elisabeth Bik will conclude the Fraud Triptych started by Smut Clyde. We shall meet a former mentee of Paul B Fisher, Sujit Bhutia, who is now busy fabricating data at his own lab at National Institute of Technology in India. Our next encounter will be with Fisher’s and Benjamin Bonavida’s past collaborator Devasis Chatterjee, who recently abruptly stopped being a principal investigator at the Brown University.
Benjamin Bonavida is a prolific science book author and recently retired as UCLA professor. He previously had to retract some papers as others took the blame. Yet Smut Clyde found so many fraudulent works signed by Bonavida that one wonders if this cancer researcher is a victim or rather the perpetrator here.
US cancer research professors Paul B Fisher, Paul Dent and Stephen Grant look like the characters of a Joel and Ethan Coen crime movie, unfortunately never filmed. Smut Clyde will give you a peek into their spree of data manipulation
A former Karolinska researcher is subject of research misconduct investigation, for forwarding to university OA publishing bills for her past research there. To save €3k, no trick is too dirty for Karolinska Institutet.
A cancer research professor in China runs a paper mill, sources claim he sells first authorships for a bribe. Problem for his customers: the peer-reviewed papers they pay for, contain fake data.
Spain is where dishonest research gets rewarded, with awards, grants and media fame. No wonder the New York-based immunologist Andrea Cerutti opened a second lab in Barcelona.
I obtained the full report on the case of Karin Dahlman-Wright, Vice-Rector of the Karolinska Institutet. The investigation by Danish researcher Nils Billestrup for CEPN found 6 out of 8 papers contained data manipulations, but only in 2 cases serious enough to affect the conclusions.
I obtained a partial script of a stage play which recently premiered in Paris: “La Passion de Don Carlos”. Any similarities with Spanish or French cancer researchers are entirely coincidental.
Carlos Lopez-Otin was forced to retract EIGHT papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, right after he retracted a very important paper in Nature Cell Biology. Spanish elites cry foul, a letter signed by 50 Spanish researchers was sent to JBC to prevent retractions. The ringleader is Juan Valcarcel of CRG in Barcelona, and I release 3 incompetent investigative reports Valcarcel commissioned in 2015 to whitewash his CRG colleague Maria Pia Cosma.
Manipulated data in 17 papers from one cancer research lab in China gets flagged on PubPeer. It ends with the university hospital in Wuhan issuing a secret statement accusing the US pharma giant a Merck of a conspiracy to slander a Chinese Academy member, Dr Ding Ma.
