Scientist Fabricates Cancer Data

A postdoc at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital is found guilty of falsifying his findings in a lung cancer study.

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FLICKR, MICHAEL PERECKAS

A former research fellow at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School committed research misconduct, according to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), which announced its findings in yesterday’s Federal Register.

Based on evidence collected from a joint investigation by Brigham and Harvard, the ORI concluded that Jian Ma “knowingly and intentionally fabricated and falsified data.” Ma falsified immunoblots in an unpublished manuscript investigating a gene’s involvement in lung cancer sensitivity to a drug called rapamycin. The paper containing the falsified data was submitted to the Journal of Clinical Investigation in August 2008, but it was subsequently withdrawn by one of the authors in January 2009 prior to publication. The research was funded by the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of ...

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