The Scientific Journal Retraction of the Week

Exactly one year ago Dr. Eugene Carragee devoted an entire issue of The Spine Journal (TSJ) to the issue of bias in the early studies of BMP2.  Carragee’s work in that now infamous June issue has been roundly criticized (from more than one podium presentation as well as in the pages of OTW) for several mistakes including data omissions and a pattern of intellectual dishonesty.

Specifically, Carragee has been accused of committing three fatal errors in his June 2011 study.  They were:

1. 
   

   Omissions of facts which had the potential to change the conclusions of TSJ’s study

Ironically enough, Carragee’s primary hypothesis in that June TSJ issue was that studies which are supported by industry are vulnerable to bias, methodological error and omission of relevant data.  In other words, he accused authors of industry sponsored research of exactly the same kind of errors that he committed in HIS study.

Truth be told, it doesn’t take industry funding to trigger biased research—as Carragee himself demonstrated.  So, we wondered, how prevalent is this phenomenon of academic bias in peer reviewed scientific literature?  The answer, we learned, is that it is fairly common.

To illustrate this point, OTW is launching a new feature called: The Scientific Journal Retraction of the Week.

Each week, OTW will publish a recent scientific journal retraction arising from shoddy, lazy or downright fraudulent research.  These are examples of researchers who omitted or falsified data, used data out of context or employed such awful logic that they were forced to retract their study.  So far, none of them were industry sponsored!

These examples are collected by Retraction Watch and we are honored to be able to present them with permission from Retraction Watch to our readers.  Retraction Watch was started in 2010 by Adam Marcus and Ivan Oranksy, M.D.

Immunity – van Parijs’ Falsifications

This week’s dubious honor of being included in “Retraction of the Week” belongs to Dr. Luk van Parijs, a former biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who was fired in 2005 after he admitted to making up data.  Dr. van Parijs’ article “Autoimmunity as the Consequence of a Spontaneous Mutation in Rasgrp1″: (Immunity 19, 243–255; August 2003) was initially published in the August 2003 journal Immunity. The retraction was dated May 25, 2012.

“The authors have agreed to retract the paper because of the falsification of the Western blot in Figure 6A. The figure shows a defect in Ras activation, labeled as RasGTP, following TCR engagement, in thymocytes isolated from a RasGRP1 lag mutant mouse strain. This data set is one of several that show signaling and functional deficiencies identified for cells with los[s] of function of RasGRP. The authors stand by the validity of the other figures, results, and interpretation in this paper. This matter was investigated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Office of Research Integrity at the United States Department of Health & Human Services, which found that the figure was falsified by Luk van Parijs, who is solely responsible. The authors deeply regret any inconvenience resulting from the publication of this data.”

According to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge, the paper was cited 44 times. Oransky writes it was among those cited by the Office of Research Integrity in its 2009 findings about the van Parisjs case:

“While at MIT, Dr. Luk van Parijs falsified figures in grant applications submitted to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a presentation in 2003, and Figure 6A, Immunity 19:243-255 (2003), by falsely claiming that the image in the figure represented an immunoprecipitation assay for Ras-GTP and a Western blot for total Ras protein, when it actually represented a Western blot for Bcl-2 and [beta]-actin in T cells, previously published as Figure 5C, J. Immunol., 168:597-603 (2002).”

By Retraction Watch’s count, it’s the fifth retraction for van Parijs, who was sentenced last year to six months of house arrest.

In February 2011, the government filed criminal charges against Van Parijs in the U.S. District Court in Boston, citing his use of fake data in a 2003 grant application to the National Institutes of Health, based in Bethesda, Maryland. According to the journal, Nature, van Parijs entered a guilty plea, and the government asked Judge Denise Casper for a six-month jail term because of the seriousness of the fraud, which involved a $2 million grant. “We want to discourage other researchers from engaging in similar behavior, ” prosecutor Gregory Noonan, an assistant U.S. attorney, told Nature.

In June 2011, Casper opted instead for six months of home detention with electronic monitoring, plus 400 hours of community service and a payment to MIT of $61, 117—restitution for the already-spent grant money that MIT had to return to the National Institutes of Health.