Scientific Misconduct

A Purdue University physicist who claimed to have demonstrated a tabletop fusion process that could revolutionize energy production is guilty of research misconduct in asserting that his findings were independently reproduced, a university committee said Friday. The panel did not investigate whether Rusi P.

Valencia biotech firm MannKind Corp.'s stock fell 11% Thursday after reports that a former senior manager said he had uncovered potentially serious problems with clinical trials of the company's experimental insulin inhaler. The Food and Drug Administration is reviewing the Afrezza inhaler and is expected to make a decision Dec. 29 on whether to approve it. The former MannKind manager, John Arditi, filed a lawsuit against the company in New Jersey Superior Court, saying he was wrongfully fired after internal audits he conducted in November 2009 uncovered "potential fraud and scientific misconduct" involving Afrezza clinical trial data.

A cardiologist testifying in Merck & Co.'s federal trial in Houston over Vioxx accused the drug maker of engaging in scientific misconduct, suppressing clinical evidence and stifling medical discourse as it promoted the painkiller. Eric Topol, chairman of the cardiovascular medicine department of the Cleveland Clinic, said Vioxx could cause heart attacks anytime after a patient began taking it, and that its risks were apparent as early as 1999, when the drug was approved.

A Purdue University physicist who claimed to have demonstrated a tabletop fusion process that could revolutionize energy production is guilty of research misconduct in asserting that his findings were independently reproduced, a university committee said Friday. The panel did not investigate whether Rusi P.

Spurred by concerns about cases of scientific misconduct, a prestigious medical journal will require study authors to sign a pledge that they will let editors examine their raw data if requested, the journal editor said. The journal also will tighten its requirement on disclosing financial interests involved in the research, said George Lundberg of the Journal of the American Medical Assn. The steps are among requirements being imposed to protect the credibility of the journal, Lundberg said.

The Department of Health and Human Services has proposed tough new measures to prevent and punish scientific fraud, including spot audits of researchers who receive federal funds, the creation of an "office of scientific integrity" and financial sanctions against universities that fail to monitor their scientists adequately.

Scientists and government officials are increasingly concerned by reports of irregularities in biomedical research but are deeply divided over what sort of corrective measures are necessary. Some congressman are contemplating new laws to regulate and to punish data-fudging researchers who are often supported by large federal grants. But many biomedical researchers are aghast at such proposals.

Suggesting that instances of scientific fraud may be significantly under-reported, three prestigious national scientific academies Wednesday called for a tougher system to identify such cases, investigate and resolve them. To accomplish the task, the academies recommended the appointment of a national review board to oversee ethical matters and pursue allegations of fraud. "The pressures for success are inexorable," said Edward E. David, former science adviser to President Richard M.

An influential physicist whose work in superconductivity and molecular-scale electronics seemed poised to revolutionize his field has been fired by Bell Labs for falsifying experiments over a four-year period. A panel of scientists appointed by Bell Labs found that Jan Hendrik Schon misrepresented data 16 times, publishing identical charts to support his thesis in several scientific papers even though the experiments were different.

New pressures for funding, fame and profit have created an atmosphere that is sometimes conducive to scientific misconduct, the chairman of an Institute of Medicine study committee reported Monday. Dr. Arthur H. Rubenstein of the University of Chicago said the field of biomedical research has seen "increased stresses" from competition for decreased funding. And he said the race to develop new drugs makes research irregularities more likely than a decade ago.

Two new reports involving the painkiller Vioxx raise fresh concerns about how drug companies influence the interpretation and publication of medical research. The reports claim that Merck & Co. frequently paid academic scientists to take credit for research articles prepared by company-hired medical writers, a practice called ghostwriting.

The state has agreed to pay $925,000 to unwitting subjects of an infamous 1930s stuttering experiment -- orphans who were badgered and belittled as children by University of Iowa researchers trying to induce speech impediments. Johnson County District Court Judge Denver Dillard issued an order approving the settlement, which still must be ratified by the State Appeal Board. The six plaintiffs said the experiment left lifelong psychological and emotional scars.

In the fall of 1992, Kanatjan Alibekov defected from Russia to the United States, bringing detailed, and chilling, descriptions of his role in making biological weapons for the former Soviet Union. As a doctor of microbiology, a physician and a colonel in the Red Army, he helped lead the Soviet effort. He told U.S. intelligence agencies that the Soviets had devoted at least 30,000 scientists, working at dozens of sites, to develop bioweapons, despite a 1972 international ban on such work.

The editor of a prominent medical journal has apologized to a South Korean fertility scientist for statements the editor made to the Los Angeles Times during an authorship dispute. Dr. Alan DeCherney, editor of Fertility and Sterility, wrote in a May 31 letter to Kwang-Yul Cha that he regretted telling The Times that Cha and his co-authors had potentially committed plagiarism by submitting an article for publication that had previously been published in South Korea.

A U.S. medical journal will retract an article that set off an international plagiarism dispute but will take no action against the lead author, a prominent South Korean scientist whose Los Angeles institute is in line to receive state funds for stem cell research. The article, published by Kwang-Yul Cha and others in the journal Fertility and Sterility in December 2005, had been published the year before in a Korean journal by a former doctoral student in Cha's lab in South Korea.

A prominent South Korean fertility researcher with growing healthcare enterprises in Los Angeles has launched a vigorous legal and public relations campaign in advance of a meeting today to decide whether he and others plagiarized a research paper. The moves by Dr. Kwang-Yul Cha are unusual and have surprised medical journal editors nationally, who worry about the ability of academic publications to cope with such challenges.

The National Institutes of Health has cleared Nobel Laureate David Baltimore and his co-workers of scientific misconduct charges, but sharply criticized them for failing to take "appropriate action" to adequately correct errors in their work, according to government documents made public Wednesday.

A federal grand jury Tuesday indicted two New Jersey research scientists on charges that they conspired to make millions of dollars selling stolen trade secrets for the commercial production of two pharmaceuticals, including a brand of interferon used to treat a form of cancer common among people with AIDS. Bernard Mayles, a 52-year-old Manalapan, N.J., resident named in the indictment, was a research scientist at Schering-Plough Inc., a Madison, N.J.

A federal judge on Friday spared a convicted National Institutes of Health researcher, Dr. P. Trey Sunderland III, any prison time but ordered him to hand over $300,000 in illicit payments he took from a major drug company. U.S. District Judge J. Frederic Motz also sentenced Sunderland to two years of supervised probation and 400 hours of community service. "Obviously, this was unacceptable conduct," Motz said. Sunderland had pleaded guilty Dec.

A senior government scientist from the National Institutes of Health who took about $300,000 in unauthorized payments from a drug company pleaded guilty Friday to a federal charge that he committed a criminal conflict of interest. The admission by Dr. P. Trey Sunderland III came after years of denials by his attorneys and six months after the scientist had asserted his constitutional right against self-incrimination to a congressional subcommittee.