Luk Van Parijs

Last updated

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 Van Parijs admitted to fabricating and falsifying research data in a paper, several unpublished manuscripts, and grant applications.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. [1]

Contents

Van Parijs' area of research was in the use of short-interference RNA in studying disease mechanisms, especially in autoimmune diseases. He was studying normal immune cell function and defects in these cells during disease development.

Timeline

Literature corrections

(Original paper, correction; Chronological by literature correction - w/in institution of origin.)

Harvard papers

Caltech papers

MIT papers

(Each correction retracts data.)

News media

(Chronological)

  1. Robert L. Hotz, "Caltech President Who Raised School's Profile to Step Down" (Los Angeles Times, 4 Oct. 2005, P. A1)
  2. MIT News Office, "MIT professor dismissed for research misconduct" (press release) 27 Oct. 2005; published in News Office's TechTalk 2 Nov. 2005 (50(7): 3, 6)
  3. Boston Globe, "MIT professor is fired over fabricated data," 28 Oct. 2005
  4. Samuel Reich, Eugenie (2005) MIT professor sacked for fabricating data. NewScientist.com (28 Oct.)
  5. New York Times, "M.I.T. Dismisses a Researcher, Saying He Fabricated Some Data," 28 Oct. 2005
  6. The Tech (MIT student paper), "MIT Fires Professor Van Parijs for Using Fake Data in Papers," 28 Oct. 2005
  7. Boston Globe, "More doubts raised on fired MIT professor," 29 Oct. 2005
  8. Harvard Crimson, "MIT Professor Fired for Faking Data," 31 Oct. 2005
  9. The Tech, "Van Parijs’ Research at Caltech, Brigham Drawing New Scrutiny," 1 Nov. 2005
  10. TheScientist.com, "Immunologists prepare for fraud fallout," 3 Nov. 2005
  11. Dalton, R. (2005) Universities scramble to assess scope of falsified results. Nature 438(7064): 7 (3 Nov.) PMID   16267515
  12. Couzin, J. (2005) MIT terminates researcher over data fabrication. Science 310(5749): 758 (4 Nov.) PMID   16272088
  13. New Scientist, "One bad apple..." (unsigned editorial), 5 Nov. 2005
  14. Chronicle of Higher Education, "MIT Fires Biology Professor Who Admitted Faking Data," 11 Nov. 2005 (Payment or subscription required.)
  15. unsigned editorial (2006) Scientific blues. Nature Immunology 7(1): 1 (1 Jan.) PMID   16357846
  16. Reich, E.S. (2006) Bad data fail to halt patents. Nature 439(7075): 379 (26 Jan.) PMID   16437075
  17. Odling-Smee, L., Giles, J., Fuyuno, I., Cyranoski, D., & Marris, E. (2007) Misconduct Special: Where are they now? Nature 445(7125): 244-5 (18 Jan.) PMID   17230161
  18. Reich, E.S. (2007) Scientific misconduct report still under wraps. New Scientist ?(2631): 16 (24 Nov.)
  19. Reich, E.S. (2009) Former MIT biologist penalized for falsifying data. Nature.com (3 Feb.) Nature News or here
  20. Reich, E.S. (2009) Beating the science cheats. New Scientist ?(2706): 22 (2 May)

See also

Related Research Articles

Scientific misconduct is the violation of the standard codes of scholarly conduct and ethical behavior in the publication of professional scientific research. It is violation of scientific integrity: violation of the scientific method and of research ethics in science, including in the design, conduct, and reporting of research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Baltimore</span> American biologist (born 1938)

David Baltimore is an American biologist, university administrator, and 1975 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine. He is a professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he served as president from 1997 to 2006. He founded the Whitehead Institute and directed it from 1982 to 1990. In 2008, he served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In academic publishing, a retraction is a mechanism by which a published paper in an academic journal is flagged for being seriously flawed to the extent that their results and conclusions can no longer be relied upon. Retracted articles are not removed from the published literature but marked as retracted. In some cases it may be necessary to remove an article from publication, such as when the article is clearly defamatory, violates personal privacy, is the subject of a court order, or might pose a serious health risk to the general public.

Robert Allan Weinberg is a biologist, Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), director of the Ludwig Center of the MIT, and American Cancer Society Research Professor. His research is in the area of oncogenes and the genetic basis of human cancer.

Geoffrey Chang is a professor at the University of California, San Diego's Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Department of Pharmacology, School of Medicine. His laboratory focuses on the structural biology of integral membrane proteins, particularly exploring X-ray crystallography techniques for solving the tertiary structures of membrane proteins that are notoriously resistant to crystallization. The laboratory has specialized in structures of multidrug resistance transporter proteins in bacteria. In 2001, while a faculty member of The Scripps Research Institute, Chang was awarded a Beckman Young Investigators Award, designed to support researchers early in their academic careers, for his work on the structural biology of multidrug resistance. Chang announced a move from Scripps to neighboring UC San Diego in 2012.

Catherine M. Verfaillie obtained an M.D. from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 1982. After graduation, she specialized in internal medicine and in 1987. Currently she works as a Belgian molecular biologist and professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven . Her work on the ability of adult stem cells to differentiate to different cell types has garnered controversy due to accusations of poor laboratory practices and fabrication of data by members of her laboratory. In 2019, it was shown that several of her more recent papers also contained altered images and potential fraud was committed. An investigation by the KU Leuven Commission on Research Integrity, finished in July 2020, concluded that there was no breach of research integrity in the investigated publications, but that some papers did contain inaccurate figures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BAZ1B</span> Protein-coding gene in the species Homo sapiens

Tyrosine-protein kinase, or Bromodomain adjacent to zinc finger domain, 1B (BAZ1B) is an enzyme that in humans is encoded by the BAZ1B gene.

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.

Naoki Mori is a Japanese virologist who is a professor at the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan. He has received numerous awards for his research on human T-cell leukemia virus type 1 (HTLV-1), a retrovirus which causes adult T-cell leukemia.

Anil Potti is a physician and former Duke University associate professor and cancer researcher, focusing on oncogenomics. He, along with Joseph Nevins, are at the center of a research fabrication scandal at Duke University. On 9 November 2015, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) found that Potti had engaged in research misconduct. According to Potti's voluntary settlement agreement with ORI, Potti can continue to perform research with the requirement of supervision until year 2020, while he "neither admits nor denies ORI's findings of research misconduct." As of 2020 Potti, who is employed at the Cancer Center of North Dakota, has had 11 of his research publications retracted, one publication has received an expression of concern, and two others have been corrected.

Silvia Bulfone-Paus is an Italian immunologist. She is the chair of the Research Center Borstel's Department of Immunology and Cell Biology and also serves as professor of Immunobiology at the University of Manchester School of Medicine.

Terry S. Elton is an American professor of pharmacology at the Ohio State University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Jackson (biologist)</span> British biologist

Sir Stephen Philip Jackson, FRS, FMedSci is the Frederick James Quick Professor of Biology. He is a senior group leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute and associate group leader at the Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge.

Soodabeh Davaran is an Iranian researcher, and professor of polymer chemistry in the Faculty of Pharmacy in Tabriz University of Medical Sciences. She has written many articles about chemistry. Some of her scientific articles have been retracted because of figure manipulation and misconduct.

Lymphocyte expansion molecule (LEXM) is a protein discovered in 2015, found to be involved in immune responses to some cancers and viruses. The protein was initially found to be responsible for an increased production of T cells in mice. The original paper has since been retracted upon recommendation of Imperial College's investigators due to concerns about duplication of data. The protein may be relevant to humans and could be a target for drug discovery.

Annarosa Leri is a medical doctor and former associate professor at Harvard University. Along with former professor Piero Anversa, Leri was engaged in biomedical research at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School. Since at least 2003 Anversa and Leri had investigated the ability of the heart to regenerate damaged cells using cardiac stem cells.

Douglas D. Taylor is an entrepreneur and former academic researcher in the field of extracellular vesicles.

Abida 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.

Abderrahmane Kaidi is a biologist whose research focussed on cancer and DNA damage. He is best known for committing research fraud that led to his resignation as a lecturer at the University of Bristol. In 2018, he was investigated by the university for alleged misconducts in behaviour and research issues. He was found guilty of faking research, which he admitted as a mean to impress other scientists for collaboration and were not for publication.

References

  1. Samuel Reich, Eugenie (2011). "Biologist spared jail for grant fraud". Nature. 474 (7353): 552. doi: 10.1038/474552a . PMID   21720338.