Scientific misconduct is the violation of the standard codes of scholarly conduct and ethical behavior in the publication of professional scientific research. A Lancet review on Handling of Scientific Misconduct in Scandinavian countries provides the following sample definitions, reproduced in The COPE report 1999:
David Baltimore is an American biologist, university administrator, and 1975 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine. He is currently President Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he served as president from 1997 to 2006. He also served as the director of the Joint Center for Translational Medicine, which joined Caltech and UCLA in a program to translate basic scientific discoveries into clinical realities. He also formerly served as president of Rockefeller University from 1990 to 1991, founder and Director of the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research from 1982 to 1990, and was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007.
In the United States, Office of Inspector General (OIG) is a generic term for the oversight division of a federal or state agency aimed at preventing inefficient or unlawful operations within their parent agency. Such offices are attached to many federal executive departments, independent federal agencies, as well as state and local governments. Each office includes an inspector general and employees charged with identifying, auditing, and investigating fraud, waste, abuse, embezzlement and mismanagement of any kind within the executive department.
The regulation of science refers to use of law, or other ruling, by academic or governmental bodies to allow or restrict science from performing certain practices, or researching certain scientific areas.
Eric T. Poehlman, a scientist in the field of human obesity and aging, was the first academic in the United States to be jailed for falsifying data in a grant application. He had published fraudulent research alleging hormone replacement injections as a therapy for menopause, when in fact they had no proven medical benefits at all.
Stuart W. Bowen Jr., is an American lawyer who served as the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) from October 2004 to October 2013. He previously served as the Inspector General for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA-IG), a position to which he was appointed in January 2004. Mr. Bowen's mission includes ensuring effective oversight of the $63 billion appropriated for Iraq's relief and reconstruction.
Luk Van Parijs was an associate professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for Cancer Research. After investigating for a year, MIT fired Van Parijs for research misconduct. Van Parijs admitted to fabricating and falsifying research data in a paper, several unpublished manuscripts, and grant applications. In March 2011, Van Parijs pleaded guilty in a U.S. District Court in Boston to one count of making a false statement on a federal grant application. The government asked Judge Denise Casper for a 6-month jail term because of the seriousness of the fraud, which involved a $2-million grant. After several prominent scientists including Van Parijs' former post-doc supervisor pleading for clemency on his behalf, on 13 June, Van Parijs was finally sentenced 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.
Thereza Imanishi-Kari is an associate professor of pathology at Tufts University. Her research focuses on the origins of autoimmune diseases, particularly systemic lupus erythematosus, studied using mice as model organisms. Previously she had been a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is notable for her role in what became known as the "Baltimore affair", in which a 1986 paper she co-authored with David Baltimore was the subject of research misconduct allegations. Following a series of investigations, she was fully exonerated of the charges in 1996.
The Office of Research Integrity (ORI) is a U.S. government agency that focuses on research integrity, especially in health. It was created when the Office of Scientific Integrity (OSI) in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Office of Scientific Integrity Review (OSIR) in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health merged in May 1992. The Office of Research Integrity oversees and directs Public Health Service (PHS) research integrity activities on behalf of the Secretary of Health and Human Services, except for the regulatory research integrity activities of the Food and Drug Administration. Organizationally, ORI is located within the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health (OASH) within the Office of the Secretary of Health and Human Services (OS), in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Ranjit Kumar Chandra is an Indian-born Canadian researcher and self-proclaimed "father of nutritional immunology" who committed scientific and health care fraud. Chandra's misconduct was the subject of a 2006 documentary by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). A libel trial in July 2015, concluded that the allegations of fraud against Chandra were truthful; he was ordered to pay $1.6 million to cover CBC's legal fees, and later that year was stripped of his membership in the Order of Canada. As of 2020, four of Chandra's research publications have been retracted, and one has been corrected.
Marc D. Hauser is an American evolutionary biologist and a researcher in primate behavior, animal cognition and human behavior found guilty of fabricated and falsified data. Hauser was a Harvard University professor from 1998 to 2011, when he resigned after being found guilty for research misconduct."
R. Michael Roberts is an American biologist and a Curators' Professor of animal science at the University of Missouri.
MedicoLegal Investigations Ltd (MLI) was a United Kingdom private limited company which worked with pharmaceutical companies to investigate alleged fraud and misconduct in medical research. Based in Cambridge, England, it was established in July 1996 by Frank Wells, former Director of Medical Affairs for the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry and Peter Jay, retired detective chief inspector for Scotland Yard and former senior investigator for the General Medical Council Solicitors, and describes itself as an "independent external whistleblower service". The Company was dissolved in 2013.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) is an office in the United States Federal government. It was established in January 1999 in accordance with the Internal Revenue Service Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998 to provide independent oversight of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) activities. As mandated by RRA 98, TIGTA assumed most of the responsibilities of the IRS' former Inspection Service.
Carlo Maria Croce is an Italian-American professor of medicine at Ohio State University, specializing in oncology and the molecular mechanisms underlying cancer. Croce and his research have attracted public attention because of multiple allegations of scientific misconduct.
Dipak Kumar Das was the director of the Cardiovascular Research Center at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington. Das is known for his work on the beneficial properties of resveratrol, which is found in red wine, but at least twenty of his research papers have been retracted.
Terry S. Elton is an American professor of pharmacology at the Ohio State University.
William Giannobile is a leader in the field of periodontology and an internationally recognized scholar in oral regenerative medicine, tissue engineering, and precision medicine. Giannobile currently holds the position of Dean of Harvard School of Dental Medicine (HSDM), and began serving in this role in September 2020. Giannobile was named Dean of HSDM in April 2020. Prior to HSDM, he served as the Najjar Endowed Professor and chair of the Department of Periodontics and Oral Medicine at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry. He was also a professor of biomedical engineering at the College of Engineering and Biointerfaces Institute.
Sophie Jamal is a Canadian endocrinologist and former osteoporosis researcher who was at the centre of a scientific misconduct case in the mid-to-late 2010s. Jamal published a high-profile paper suggesting that the heart medication nitroglycerin was a treatment for osteoporosis, and was later demonstrated to have misrepresented her results. She received a lifetime ban from receiving funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and was named directly in their disclosure report, becoming the first person mentioned by name by the institute for scientific misconduct. Jamal was later stripped of her medical license for two years, regaining it in a controversial 3–2 decision.
