WIKIMEDIA, STEAKPINBALLThe Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has reprimanded Rao M. Adibhatla, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, for falsifying experimental results in two published papers and three unfunded grant applications, according to a notice in the Federal Register published last week (January 25).
Investigators found that Adibhatla falsified Western blots representing the expression of particular phospholipids in the brain in a rodent model of stroke. He perpetuated the misconduct by presenting quantifications derived from the falsified Western blots in a bar graphs as the average of replicated Western blots. The ORI concluded that the results “cannot be substantiated by the actually experiments.”
Adibhatla agreed to request the retractions of the two papers in question—one published in 2006 in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, cited 62 times according to ISI Web of Knowledge, and the other in 2007 in Brain Research, cited 33 times.
