Dana-Farber seeks to retract 6 papers and correct 31 others

After questions raised by a science blogger, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has approached medical journals requesting that they retract six research papers and correct another 31 papers.

The research listed numerous authors, including the Harvard-affiliated medical center’s chief executive, Laurie Glimcher, and its chief operating officer, William Hahn. Other researchers included Irene Ghobrial, director of the institute's Clinical Investigator Research Program and Kenneth Anderson, a program director, among others.

The papers allegedly contained manipulated images, including charts that appeared to have elements that were duplicated or spliced together, giving a misleading impression of the results. Some of the papers cited in the blog post were published in influential journals, including Nature and Cell, over the past several decades.

Concerns about the research first garnered public attention when a British blogger, Sholto David, published an account alleging numerous discrepancies in a Jan. 2 post on the website For Better Science. The allegations were then reported by The Harvard Crimson, Harvard's student newspaper.

David, who has a biology background, told The New York Times that he often checks scientific research looking for errors, including using AI and posting on the website PubPeer.

“We only see the tiny tip of the fraud iceberg — image data duplications, the last resort of a failed scientist after every other trick failed to provide the desired result,” David wrote.

STAT reported last week that the cancer center had been investigating some of the problems David flagged for more than a year.

Officials from Dana-Farber said they are committed to ensuring the integrity of the institution's research and confirmed they were already reviewing at least some of the potential data errors.

“The presence of image discrepancies in a paper is not evidence of an author’s intent to deceive,” Barrett Rollins, the institute’s research integrity officer, wrote in a statement. “That conclusion can only be drawn after a careful, fact-based examination which is an integral part of our response. Our experience is that errors are often unintentional and do not rise to the level of misconduct.”

For at least some experts, the allegations did not prompt broader questions about the vetting systems used by scientific journals.

“I think there's a really important message here, which is that 98%, 99% of things that are published are published in good faith,” said Eric Rubin, the editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. “When we hear about edge cases where things went really wrong, it can be very alarming, but there is a scientific method, there are standards of proof and it usually almost always works.”

However, Rubin said he did not have enough information about the papers in question to assess this specific situation.

Academic integrity and research quality have become a hot-button issues as political tensions have prompted increased scrutiny of universities. The questions about Dana-Farber's research papers follow the resignation earlier this month of former Harvard President Claudine Gay amid allegations of plagiarism and criticism over her handling of anti-Semitism on campus. Last year, the president of Stanford, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, also stepped down in the aftermath of allegations of academic misconduct. However, a university probe exonerated him.