Leukemia Studies Withdrawn After Junior Scientist Admits Faking Data
America’s top government geneticist has asked that five research studies on leukemia be withdrawn because a junior colleague falsified data.
Francis Collins, director of the National Center for Human Genome Research and the senior author in the retracted studies, said in an Oct. 1 letter that a junior scientist who participated in a major leukemia gene project had confessed “to a stunning series of data misrepresentations and outright fabrications, extending over a period of at least two years.”
In effect, the letter said, the junior scientist admitted that he lied about performing some experiments and that he made up the data that he reported.
The alleged fraud, involving research on the role of a defective gene in causing leukemia, is being investigated by the NIH’s Office of Research Integrity, Collins said.
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