MIT Professor Fired over Fabricated Data

karvind writes "CNN is running a story where MIT has fired an associate professor of biology for fabricating data in a published scientific paper, in unpublished manuscripts, and in grant applications. Luk Van Parijs, 35, who was considered a rising star in the field of immunology research, admitted to the wrongdoing. The revelations are a serious blow to MIT, which prides itself on its reputation as a scientific powerhouse. The announcement also serves to answer the rumors that have been swirling on the campus since Van Parijs vanished from the campus more than a year ago and had his lab disbanded without any comment from the university. Readers may remember the infamous Jan Hendrik Schön from Bell labs."

Comments

Re:the poor grad students

[Wavicle]

This sort of black mark generally means that the person will likely have to leave academia and research altogether. In research your integrity is everything. If you lie once, nobody knows if you won't lie again. Peer reviewed Journals will generally refuse your papers without reading them. No research body would risk your name going on one of their papers which would cause it to get red flagged for automatic refusal. It's a very grave situation which can't just be dismissed by "I made a mistake." The guy went through enough school to get a Ph.D., he knew what would happen if he got caught.

Happens all the time

[HangingChad]

I remember a DoE contract researcher years ago who was putting so much pressure on his techs they were giving him the results he wanted to see. But as long as he kept getting grants the lab was willing to cover it up, even though the director of QA/QC department was provided with enough detailed results to demonstrate the scientist was presenting falsified data. It wasn't just a little tweak here or there, these were completely bogus results.

For going to the trouble of turning in the fraudulent research the tech had their phone tapped (which the lab later denied), was transferred out to a dingy little building in the middle of the desert to do menial tasks and just generally harassed until they eventually got another job.

There's so much pressure for getting grant money that producing the results that will get more grant money is pretty much the norm, espeically in contract research. Everyone likes to think science is pure, but you're deluded if you think that. It's all about making sure you've got enough charge codes to bill your time and supporting that 200% overhead rate.

Here is a more detailed account

[geoffrobinson]

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8230

Here is how they noticed a pattern:
Michael Borowitz, at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, says: "The shapes of the major clusters are often similar but in any system there is noise, and those noisy dots are in the same place too. That's hard to explain by biology. It is very difficult for me to believe that these were independent experiments." Borowitz is an expert in interpreting flow cytometry graphs, which he regularly uses to identity abnormal populations of cells in the blood and bone marrow of leukaemia patients.

Three other experts contacted, including Paul Robinson, a professor of immunopharmacology and biomedical engineering and Director of the Flow Cytometry Labs at Purdue University in West Lafayette, say that the graphs appear concerningly alike.