Report: Top Harvard Cancer Researchers Accused of Faking Data, Committing Scientific Fraud

The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, is seeking to retract six scientific studies and correct 31 others that were published by the institute's top researchers, including its CEO. The researchers are accused of manipulating data images with simple methods, primarily with copy-and-paste in image editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop.

The accusations come from [British molecular biologist] data sleuth Sholto David and colleagues on PubPeer, an online forum for researchers to discuss publications that has frequently served to spot dubious research and potential fraud. On January 2, David posted on his research integrity blog, For Better Science, a long list of potential data manipulation from DFCI researchers. The post highlighted many data figures that appear to contain pixel-for-pixel duplications. The allegedly manipulated images are of data such as Western blots, which are used to detect and visualize the presence of proteins in a complex mixture. DFCI Research Integrity Officer Barrett Rollins told The Harvard Crimson that David had contacted DFCI with allegations of data manipulation in 57 DFCI-led studies. Rollins said that the institute is "committed to a culture of accountability and integrity," and that "every inquiry about research integrity is examined fully."

The allegations are against: DFCI President and CEO Laurie Glimcher, Executive Vice President and COO William Hahn, Senior Vice President for Experimental Medicine Irene Ghobrial, and Harvard Medical School professor Kenneth Anderson.

NATURE: What's your usual process when you're combing through a paper?

SHOLTO DAVID: It's going to depend on the problem that I might expect to find. A few months ago, [the open-access journal] PLoS One retracted nine papers, and these were all to do with gastric-damage stuff. In that case, I was looking for image reuse between papers. I went and I got all of this guy's papers, and I cropped all of the images out of all the papers, put it in a giant folder and then resized them all. And I used a script to feed it into ImageTwin [software that compares images in a paper with more than 25 million images from other publications]. But for the DFCI stuff, a lot of what I found and what had been previously posted [on PubPeer] is duplicated images within the same paper. ImageTwin is really useful for these things.

I note and collect the errors on PubPeer, write a blog, send the blog to the [journal] publisher and university.