Artificial-windpipe surgeon committed misconduct

Papers authored by Paolo Macchiarini misrepresented success of pioneering procedure.

David Cyranoski
21 May 2015 Updated: 29 May 2015
A famed surgeon committed scientific misconduct in his reports of how he transplanted synthetic
windpipes seeded with stem cells into patients, according to an independent investigator.
The investigator found that six published papers authored by Paolo Macchiarini, a thoracic surgeon at
the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, had misrepresented data from recipients of the artificial
windpipes, or tracheas. The papers made the pioneering transplant operation sound more successful
than it was, said the investigator, who was commissioned by the prestigious Karolinska Institute to
examine Macchiarini's clinical procedures.
The investigation also found that two of the papers1, 2 described operations that had not received the
necessary ethical approval, and that a seventh paper3, also authored by Macchiarini, reporting
transplantation of artificial oesophagi into rats, had misrepresented results, too.
Macchiarini told Nature that he would not comment on the investigation results, which are reported in
Swedish, until he had seen an English version of the report. The translation is due to be released next
week. In November 2014, when the investigation was under way, he told Nature that he welcomed the
investigation and that he was confident that there is nothing suspect, unethical, inflated or misleading
about anything I have done or reported.
Bright spot
He will now have two weeks to formally respond to the 39-page report, which was written by Bengt
Gerdin, a general surgeon and professor emeritus at Uppsala University in Sweden.
Macchiarinis research had been hailed as a bright spot in the field of regenerative medicine, which has
been frustratingly slow to deliver on its promise of allowing synthetic materials to act as replacements
for natural organs. His procedure involved bathing a specially made polymer shaped like a trachea in
stem cells taken from the transplant-recipients bone marrow. The idea was that when this was
transplanted to replace a damaged trachea, the cells would form the necessary type of tissue and create
a seal with the surrounding tissue.
Macchiarini has put such artificial tracheas into eight people. The papers under investigation relate to
just three of them, and report that there were some signs that the synthetic tracheas had successfully
integrated. Two of those transplant recipients have since died, and one spent time in intensive care after
the procedure. Macchiarini has previously told Natures news team that the problems faced by the
patients were unrelated to the transplants.
The investigation began after four physicians at Karolinska who were involved in the care of those three
patients filed complaints. The physicians Karl-Henrik Grinnemo, Matthias Corbascio, Thomas Fux and
Oscar Simonson provided medical records that they alleged to be at odds with the published results,
and called into question the paper on the rat model.
Deliberate misrepresentation

In compiling the report, Gerdin says, he compared what was in the medical records with what was in the
publications and tried to avoid matters of interpretation that would become a quarrel between
scientists. He says that he stuck to facts such as whether the medical records showed evidence of a
follow-up at the intervals claimed by the papers.
In some instances, publications claimed improvement in patients even though there was no evidence of
an examination. This is falsification, says Gerdin. Speaking of Macchiarini, he adds: The basic rule in
science is to have all reports documented, but he doesnt have them.
In the rat-model paper, Macchiarini reported weight-gain data and computed-tomography (CT) data
that suggested that the graft was more successful in the rats than it actually was, says Gerdin.
Gerdin concludes that the misrepresentations were deliberate. If there is a mistake once, you might
think it is random. If it happens several times, you begin to question whether it really is random, he
says.
The investigation focused on Macchiarini, but Gerdin notes that Grinnemo, Corbascio and Simonson
were co-authors of one of the papers2 included in the investigation involving a patient, and that
Grinnemo was also a co-author of a second1. Im not saying they share the responsibility, but one has
to ask what they knew and what they didnt know, says Gerdin.
The three physicians did not respond to a request for comment, but Corbascio had previously told
Nature that he was involved only at a superficial level with the transplant recipient. I had complete
confidence in Macchiarini, he said.
Natures news team contacted two of the journals that published the papers (the journals were not the
focus of the investigation).We take all concerns regarding published research extremely seriously," says
Joerg Heber, executive editor of Nature Communications, which published the rat-model paper3. "It is
important that we carefully consider the report and the responses of the various parties in order to
ensure that we act appropriately. We cannot comment further at this stage. (Nature Communications
is published by Nature Publishing Group, which also publishes Nature).
A spokesperson for The Lancet, which published two of the seven papers1, 4, said that the journal's
editors were aware that the investigation had concluded, but would wait to comment until the English
translation was released.
Separately, on 9 April, the Swedish Medical Products Agency (MPA) filed a complaint with the Swedish
state prosecutor over whether proper permission was obtained to carry out the three synthetic tracheal
transplants that feature in Gerdins investigation. The operations took place at the Karolinska. Ann
Marie Janson Lang, a clinical assessor in the clinical-trials department of the MPA, says that the synthetic
tracheas meet the definition of an advanced therapy medicinal product, which requires agency
permission before it can be given to patients, but that no application for a permit was made.
It is not clear who would bear responsibility for the breach, if it is confirmed. Macchiarini told Nature
that, as a visiting professor at the Karolinska, it was never my responsibility to obtain any necessary
permissions. I was not directed to do so, nor did I have the authority to do so.

On 27 May, the Karolinska Institute posted a statement on its website that acknowledges that no
written application was made and no permit was issued to carry out the three operations in question.
The statement further explains that the decision to perform the procedures was based on a conclusion
that they were necessary to save the patients lives.
Nature 521, 406407 (28 May 2015) doi:10.1038/nature.2015.17605
http://www.nature.com/news/artificial-windpipe-surgeon-committed-misconduct-1.17605
Cyranoski, D. (2015, May 28). Artificial-windpipe surgeon committed misconduct. Nature,
406-407.

The Mind of a Con Man

By YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE
Published: April 26, 2013 443 Comments
One summer night in 2011, a tall, 40-something professor named Diederik Stapel stepped out of his elegant brick
house in the Dutch city of Tilburg to visit a friend around the corner. It was close to midnight, but his colleague
Marcel Zeelenberg had called and texted Stapel that evening to say that he wanted to see him about an urgent matter.
The two had known each other since the early 90s, when they were Ph.D. students at the University of Amsterdam;
now both were psychologists at Tilburg University. In 2010, Stapel became dean of the universitys School of Social
and Behavioral Sciences and Zeelenberg head of the social psychology department. Stapel and his wife, Marcelle, had
supported Zeelenberg through a difficult divorce a few years earlier. As he approached Zeelenbergs door, Stapel
wondered if his colleague was having problems with his new girlfriend.
Zeelenberg, a stocky man with a shaved head, led Stapel into his living room. Whats up? Stapel asked, settling onto
a couch. Two graduate students had made an accusation, Zeelenberg explained. His eyes began to fill with tears.
They suspect you have been committing research fraud.
Stapel was an academic star in the Netherlands and abroad, the author of several well-regarded studies on human
attitudes and behavior. That spring, he published a widely publicized study in Science about an experiment done at
the Utrecht train station showing that a trash-filled environment tended to bring out racist tendencies in individuals.
And just days earlier, he received more media attention for a study indicating that eating meat made people selfish
and less social.
His enemies were targeting him because of changes he initiated as dean, Stapel replied, quoting a Dutch proverb
about high trees catching a lot of wind. When Zeelenberg challenged him with specifics to explain why certain facts
and figures he reported in different studies appeared to be identical Stapel promised to be more careful in the
future. As Zeelenberg pressed him, Stapel grew increasingly agitated.
Finally, Zeelenberg said: I have to ask you if youre faking data.
No, thats ridiculous, Stapel replied. Of course not.
That weekend, Zeelenberg relayed the allegations to the university rector, a law professor named Philip Eijlander,
who often played tennis with Stapel. After a brief meeting on Sunday, Eijlander invited Stapel to come by his house on
Tuesday morning. Sitting in Eijlanders living room, Stapel mounted what Eijlander described to me as a spirited
defense, highlighting his work as dean and characterizing his research methods as unusual. The conversation lasted
about five hours. Then Eijlander politely escorted Stapel to the door but made it plain that he was not convinced of
Stapels innocence.
That same day, Stapel drove to the University of Groningen, nearly three hours away, where he was a professor from
2000 to 2006. The campus there was one of the places where he claimed to have collected experimental data for
several of his studies; to defend himself, he would need details from the place. But when he arrived that afternoon, the
school looked very different from the way he remembered it being five years earlier. Stapel started to despair when he
realized that he didnt know what buildings had been around at the time of his study. Then he saw a structure that he
recognized, a computer center. Thats where it happened, he said to himself; thats where he did his experiments
with undergraduate volunteers. This is going to work.
On his return trip to Tilburg, Stapel stopped at the train station in Utrecht. This was the site of his study linking
racism to environmental untidiness, supposedly conducted during a strike by sanitation workers. In the experiment
described in the Science paper, white volunteers were invited to fill out a questionnaire in a seat among a row of six
chairs; the row was empty except for the first chair, which was taken by a black occupant or a white one. Stapel and

his co-author claimed that white volunteers tended to sit farther away from the black person when the surrounding
area was strewn with garbage. Now, looking around during rush hour, as people streamed on and off the platforms,
Stapel could not find a location that matched the conditions described in his experiment.
No, Diederik, this is ridiculous, he told himself at last. You really need to give it up.
After he got home that night, he confessed to his wife. A week later, the university suspended him from his job and
held a news conference to announce his fraud. It became the lead story in the Netherlands and would dominate
headlines for months. Overnight, Stapel went from being a respected professor to perhaps the biggest con man in
academic science.
I first met Stapel in the summer of 2012, nearly a year after his dismissal from Tilburg. Id read about his fraud in
various places, including the pages of Science magazine, where I work as a writer covering mostly astronomy and
space science. Before seeing the news accounts, I was unaware of the study Stapel published in Science; the news
writers there have no involvement with the research papers published in the magazine.
When Stapel and I met for lunch in Antwerp, about a 50-mile drive from Tilburg, investigating committees at the
three universities where he had worked Amsterdam, Groningen and Tilburg were in the process of combing
through his several dozen research papers to determine which ones were fraudulent. The scrutiny was meant not only
to clean up the scientific record but also to establish whether any of Stapels co-authors, including more than 20 Ph.D.
students he supervised, shared any of the blame. It was already evident that many of the doctoral dissertations he
oversaw were based on his fabricated data.
Right away Stapel expressed what sounded like heartfelt remorse for what he did to his students. I have fallen from
my throne I am on the floor, he said, waving at the ground. I am in therapy every week. I hate myself. That
afternoon and in later conversations, he referred to himself several times as tall, charming or handsome, less out of
arrogance, it seemed, than what I took to be an anxious desire to focus on positive aspects of himself that were
demonstrably not false.
Stapels fraud may shine a spotlight on dishonesty in science, but scientific fraud is hardly new. The rogues gallery of
academic liars and cheats features scientific celebrities who have enjoyed similar prominence. The once-celebrated
South Korean stem-cell researcher Hwang Woo Suk stunned scientists in his field a few years ago after it was
discovered that almost all of the work for which he was known was fraudulent. The prominent Harvard evolutionary
biologist Marc Hauser resigned in 2011 during an investigation by the Office of Research Integrity at the Department
of Health and Human Services that would end up determining that some of his papers contained fabricated data.
Every year, the Office of Research Integrity uncovers numerous instances of bad behavior by scientists, ranging from
lying on grant applications to using fake images in publications. A blog called Retraction Watch publishes a steady
stream of posts about papers being retracted by journals because of allegations or evidence of misconduct.
Each case of research fraud thats uncovered triggers a similar response from scientists. First disbelief, then anger,
then a tendency to dismiss the perpetrator as one rotten egg in an otherwise-honest enterprise. But the scientific
misconduct that has come to light in recent years suggests at the very least that the number of bad actors in science
isnt as insignificant as many would like to believe. And considered from a more cynical point of view, figures like
Hwang and Hauser are not outliers so much as one end on a continuum of dishonest behaviors that extend from the
cherry-picking of data to fit a chosen hypothesis which many researchers admit is commonplace to outright
fabrication. Still, the nature and scale of Stapels fraud sets him apart from most other cheating academics. The
extent to which I did it, the longevity of it, makes it extreme, he told me. Because it is not one paper or 10 but many
more.
Stapel did not deny that his deceit was driven by ambition. But it was more complicated than that, he told me. He
insisted that he loved social psychology but had been frustrated by the messiness of experimental data, which rarely
led to clear conclusions. His lifelong obsession with elegance and order, he said, led him to concoct sexy results that
journals found attractive. It was a quest for aesthetics, for beauty instead of the truth, he said. He described his
behavior as an addiction that drove him to carry out acts of increasingly daring fraud, like a junkie seeking a bigger
and better high.
When I asked Stapel if he had told me the truth, he looked offended. He didnt have any reason to lie anymore, he
said. For more than a decade, he ran an experiment in deceit, and now he was finally ready for the truth to
understand how and why he ended up in this place. When you live your life and suddenly something extreme
happens, he said, your whole life becomes a bag of possible explanations for why you are here now.
Stapel lives in a picturesque tree-lined neighborhood in Tilburg, a quiet city of 200,000 in the south of the
Netherlands. One afternoon last November, he sat in his kitchen eating a quickly assembled lunch of cheese, bread
and chocolate sprinkles, running his fingers through his hair and mulling the future. The universities investigating
him were preparing to come out with a final report a week later, which Stapel hoped would bring an end to the
incessant flogging he had received in the Dutch media since the beginning of the scandal. The reports publication
would also allow him to release a book he had written in Dutch titled Ontsporing derailment in English for
which he was paid a modest advance. The book is an examination of his life based on a personal diary he started after
his fraud was made public. Stapel wanted it to bring both redemption and profit, and he seemed not to have given
much thought to whether it would help or hurt him in his narrower quest to seek forgiveness from the students and
colleagues he duped.

Stapel brought out individually wrapped chocolate bars for us to share. As we ate them, I watched him neatly fold up
his wrappers into perfectly rectangular shapes. Later, I got used to his reminding me not to leave doors ajar when we
walked in or out of a room. When I pointed this out, he admitted to a lifelong obsession with order and symmetry.
Several times in our conversation, Stapel alluded to having a fuzzy, postmodernist relationship with the truth, which
he agreed served as a convenient fog for his wrongdoings. Its hard to know the truth, he said. When somebody
says, I love you, how do I know what it really means? At the time, the Netherlands would soon be celebrating the
arrival of St. Nicholas, and the younger of his two daughters sat down by the fireplace to sing a traditional Dutch song
welcoming St. Nick. Stapel remarked to me that children her age, which was 10, knew that St. Nick wasnt really going
to come down the chimney. But they like to believe it anyway, because it assures them of presents, he told me with a
wink.
In his early years of research when he supposedly collected real experimental data Stapel wrote papers laying out
complicated and messy relationships between multiple variables. He soon realized that journal editors preferred
simplicity. They are actually telling you: Leave out this stuff. Make it simpler, Stapel told me. Before long, he was
striving to write elegant articles.
On a Sunday morning, as we drove to a village near Maastricht to see his parents, Stapel reflected on why his behavior
had sparked such outrage in the Netherlands. People think of scientists as monks in a monastery looking out for the
truth, he said. People have lost faith in the church, but they havent lost faith in science. My behavior shows that
science is not holy.
What the public didnt realize, he said, was that academic science, too, was becoming a business. There are scarce
resources, you need grants, you need money, there is competition, he said. Normal people go to the edge to get that
money. Science is of course about discovery, about digging to discover the truth. But it is also communication,
persuasion, marketing. I am a salesman. I am on the road. People are on the road with their talk. With the same talk.
Its like a circus. He named two psychologists he admired John Cacioppo and Daniel Gilbert neither of whom
has been accused of fraud. They give a talk in Berlin, two days later they give the same talk in Amsterdam, then they
go to London. They are traveling salesmen selling their story.
The car let out a warning beep to indicate that we had exceeded the speed limit. Stapel slowed down. I asked him if he
wished there had been some sort of alarm system for his career before it unraveled. That would have been helpful,
sure, he said. I think I need shocks, though. This is not enough. Some friends, he said, asked him what could have
made him stop. I am not sure, he told me. I dont think there was going to be an end. There was no stop button. My
brain was stuck. It had to explode. This was the only way.
Stapels father, Rob, who is in his 80s, walked out to greet us when we arrived. Stapels mother, Dirkje, also in her
mid-80s and a foot shorter than Stapel, made him tilt his head so that she could check out a rash on his forehead,
which he said was due to stress. He gave them a copy of his book. His mother thumbed through the pages. I never
knew Diederik was so unhappy all these years, she told me, referring to the guilt and shame that Stapel described
having lived with through his academic career.
Stapel was the youngest of four children. The family lived near Amsterdam, where Rob, a civil engineer, worked as a
senior manager of the Schiphol Airport. Stapel told me that his fathers devotion to his career led him to grow up
thinking that individuals were defined by what they accomplished professionally. Thats what my parents generation
was like, he said. You are what you achieve.
In high school, where Stapel says he excelled in his studies and at sports, he wrote and acted in plays. One of his
friends was a student named Marcelle, a fellow actor who would later become his wife. After school, Stapel briefly
studied acting at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania before deciding his acting talents were mediocre and
returning to the Netherlands to get an undergraduate degree in psychology.
He eventually applied to the University of Amsterdam to do a Ph.D. on how people judge others. He didnt get that
slot it went to a young applicant from Leiden named Marcel Zeelenberg. But a year later, Stapel joined the
university to pursue a doctorate on a different topic, assimilation and contrast, under a respected psychologist named
Willem Koomen.
Assimilation and contrast are both established psychological effects. When people are primed with, or made to
deliberate on, an abstract concept honesty, say, or arrogance they can be more likely to see it elsewhere. Thats
assimilation. Contrast can occur when people compare something to a concrete example, comparing themselves, for
instance, to the image of a supermodel.
For his dissertation, Stapel did a series of experiments showing that whether people assimilate or contrast depends on
context. In doing these studies, Stapel had to go through the tedium and messiness that are the essence of empirical
science. To prime subjects, he designed word puzzles that, when solved, led his undergraduate volunteer subjects to
words like intelligence or Einstein. Then he asked them to read a story about a character and score the character
on a numerical scale for intelligence, friendliness and other traits. Stapel found that when subjects were primed with
something in the abstract, like the word intelligence, they tended to find that trait more readily in themselves and in
others, judging, for instance, a story character as more intelligent than they otherwise would have. Yet when they
were primed with an example of the trait the word Einstein they tended to make a comparison, judging the
story character as less intelligent.
Stapel got his Ph.D. in 1997. Koomen, who is still a professor at Amsterdam, does not doubt the integrity of Stapels
experiments for the doctorate. Stapel was an extraordinarily gifted, enthusiastic and diligent Ph.D. student, Koomen
told me via e-mail. It was a privilege to work with him.

At Amsterdam, Stapel and Zeelenberg became close friends, working at two opposite corners on the same floor of the
department. Zeelenberg was from a blue-collar family; Stapel came from a more privileged background. Unlike most
graduate students, he wore suits on occasion. Zeelenberg recalls him as being obnoxious and cocky at times, but only
because he did know things better. He was also a friendly, supportive warm guy, Zeelenberg said. When Stapel
and Marcelle decided to marry in 1997, Zeelenberg attended Stapels bachelor party on a boat ride along Amsterdams
canals.
Stapel stayed in Amsterdam for three years after his Ph.D., writing papers that he says got little attention.
Nonetheless, his peers viewed him as having made a solid beginning as a researcher, and he won an award from the
European Association of Experimental Social Psychology. In 2000, he became a professor at Groningen University.
While there, Stapel began testing the idea that priming could affect people without their being aware of it. He
devised several experiments in which subjects sat in front of a computer screen on which a word or an image was
flashed for one-tenth of a second making it difficult for the participants to register the images in their conscious
minds. The subjects were then tested on a task to determine if the priming had an effect.
In one experiment conducted with undergraduates recruited from his class, Stapel asked subjects to rate their
individual attractiveness after they were flashed an image of either an attractive female face or a very unattractive
one. The hypothesis was that subjects exposed to the attractive image would through an automatic comparison
rate themselves as less attractive than subjects exposed to the other image.
The experiment and others like it didnt give Stapel the desired results, he said. He had the choice of abandoning
the work or redoing the experiment. But he had already spent a lot of time on the research and was convinced his
hypothesis was valid. I said you know what, I am going to create the data set, he told me.
Sitting at his kitchen table in Groningen, he began typing numbers into his laptop that would give him the outcome he
wanted. He knew that the effect he was looking for had to be small in order to be believable; even the most successful
psychology experiments rarely yield significant results. The math had to be done in reverse order: the individual
attractiveness scores that subjects gave themselves on a 0-7 scale needed to be such that Stapel would get a small but
significant difference in the average scores for each of the two conditions he was comparing. He made up individual
scores like 4, 5, 3, 3 for subjects who were shown the attractive face. I tried to make it random, which of course was
very hard to do, Stapel told me.
Doing the analysis, Stapel at first ended up getting a bigger difference between the two conditions than was ideal. He
went back and tweaked the numbers again. It took a few hours of trial and error, spread out over a few days, to get the
data just right.
He said he felt both terrible and relieved. The results were published in The Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology in 2004. I realized hey, we can do this, he told me.
Stapels career took off. He published more than two dozen studies while at Groningen, many of them written with his
doctoral students. They dont appear to have questioned why their supervisor was running many of the experiments
for them. Nor did his colleagues inquire about this unusual practice.
In 2006, Stapel moved to Tilburg, joining Zeelenberg. Students flocked to his lab, and he quickly rose in influence. In
September 2010, he became dean of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. He could have retreated from active
research to focus on administration, but, he told me, he couldnt resist the allure of fabricating new results. He had
already made up the data for the Utrecht train-station study and was working on the paper that would appear in
Science the following year. Colleagues sought him out to take part in new collaborations.
Stapel designed one such study to test whether individuals are inclined to consume more when primed with the idea
of capitalism. He and his research partner developed a questionnaire that subjects would have to fill out under two
subtly different conditions. In one, an M&M-filled mug with the word kapitalisme printed on it would sit on the
table in front of the subject; in the other, the mugs word would be different, a jumble of the letters in kapitalisme.
Although the questionnaire included questions relating to capitalism and consumption, like whether big cars are
preferable to small ones, the studys key measure was the amount of M&Ms eaten by the subject while answering
these questions. (The experimental approach wasnt novel; similar M&M studies had been done by others.) Stapel and
his colleague hypothesized that subjects facing a mug printed with kapitalisme would end up eating more M&Ms.
Stapel had a student arrange to get the mugs and M&Ms and later load them into his car along with a box of
questionnaires. He then drove off, saying he was going to run the study at a high school in Rotterdam where a friend
worked as a teacher.
Stapel dumped most of the questionnaires into a trash bin outside campus. At home, using his own scale, he weighed
a mug filled with M&Ms and sat down to simulate the experiment. While filling out the questionnaire, he ate the
M&Ms at what he believed was a reasonable rate and then weighed the mug again to estimate the amount a subject
could be expected to eat. He built the rest of the data set around that number. He told me he gave away some of the
M&M stash and ate a lot of it himself. I was the only subject in these studies, he said.
Around the same time that Stapel was planning this study which would not end up being published he was
approached by another colleague of his at Tilburg, Ad Vingerhoets, who asked Stapel to help him design a study to
understand whether exposure to someone crying affects empathy. Stapel came up with what Vingerhoets told me was
an excellent idea. They would give elementary-school children a coloring task in which half the kids would be asked
to color an inexpressive cartoon character, while the other half would have to color the same character shown
shedding a tear. Upon completing the task, the children would receive candy and then be asked if they were willing to
share the candy with other children a measure of pro-social behavior.

Stapel and Vingerhoets worked together with a research assistant to prepare the coloring pages and the
questionnaires. Stapel told Vingerhoets that he would collect the data from a school where he had contacts. A few
weeks later, he called Vingerhoets to his office and showed him the results, scribbled on a sheet of paper. Vingerhoets
was delighted to see a significant difference between the two conditions, indicating that children exposed to a tearyeyed picture were much more willing to share candy. It was sure to result in a high-profile publication. I said, This is
so fantastic, so incredible, Vingerhoets told me.
He began writing the paper, but then he wondered if the data had shown any difference between girls and boys.
What about gender differences? he asked Stapel, requesting to see the data. Stapel told him the data hadnt been
entered into a computer yet.
Vingerhoets was stumped. Stapel had shown him means and standard deviations and even a statistical index attesting
to the reliability of the questionnaire, which would have seemed to require a computer to produce. Vingerhoets
wondered if Stapel, as dean, was somehow testing him. Suspecting fraud, he consulted a retired professor to figure
out what to do. Do you really believe that someone with [Stapels] status faked data? the professor asked him.
At that moment, Vingerhoets told me, I decided that I would not report it to the rector.
If Stapels status served as a shield, his confidence fortified him further. His presentations at conferences were slick
and peppered with humor. He viewed himself as giving his audience what they craved: structure, simplicity, a
beautiful story. Stapel glossed over experimental details, projecting the air of a thinker who has no patience for
methods. The tone of his talks, he said, was Lets not talk about the plumbing, the nuts and bolts thats for
plumbers, for statisticians. If somebody asked a question on the possible effect of changing a condition in the
experiment, for example he made things up on the spot. I would often say, Well, I have thought about this, we did
another experiment which I havent reported here in which we tried that and it didnt work.
And yet as part of a graduate seminar he taught on research ethics, Stapel would ask his students to dig back into their
own research and look for things that might have been unethical. They got back with terrible lapses, he told me. No
informed consent, no debriefing of subjects, then of course in data analysis, looking only at some data and not all the
data. He didnt see the same problems in his own work, he said, because there were no real data to contend with.
Rumors of fraud trailed Stapel from Groningen to Tilburg, but none raised enough suspicion to prompt
investigation. Stapels atypical practice of collecting data for his graduate students wasnt questioned, either. Then, in
the spring of 2010, a graduate student noticed anomalies in three experiments Stapel had run for him. When asked
for the raw data, Stapel initially said he no longer had it. Later that year, shortly after Stapel became dean, the student
mentioned his concerns to a young professor at the university gym. Each of them spoke to me but requested
anonymity because they worried their careers would be damaged if they were identified.
The professor, who had been hired recently, began attending Stapels lab meetings. He was struck by how great the
data looked, no matter the experiment. I dont know that I ever saw that a study failed, which is highly unusual, he
told me. Even the best people, in my experience, have studies that fail constantly. Usually, half dont work.
The professor approached Stapel to team up on a research project, with the intent of getting a closer look at how he
worked. I wanted to kind of play around with one of these amazing data sets, he told me. The two of them designed
studies to test the premise that reminding people of the financial crisis makes them more likely to act generously.
In early February, Stapel claimed he had run the studies. Everything worked really well, the professor told me wryly.
Stapel claimed there was a statistical relationship between awareness of the financial crisis and generosity. But when
the professor looked at the data, he discovered inconsistencies confirming his suspicions that Stapel was engaging in
fraud.
The professor consulted a senior colleague in the United States, who told him he shouldnt feel any obligation to
report the matter. But the person who alerted the young professor, along with another graduate student, refused to let
it go. That spring, the other graduate student examined a number of data sets that Stapel had supplied to students
and postdocs in recent years, many of which led to papers and dissertations. She found a host of anomalies, the
smoking gun being a data set in which Stapel appeared to have done a copy-paste job, leaving two rows of data nearly
identical to each other.
The two students decided to report the charges to the department head, Marcel Zeelenberg. But they worried that
Zeelenberg, Stapels friend, might come to his defense. To sound him out, one of the students made up a scenario
about a professor who committed academic fraud, and asked Zeelenberg what he thought about the situation, without
telling him it was hypothetical. They should hang him from the highest tree if the allegations were true, was
Zeelenbergs response, according to the student.
The students waited till the end of summer, when they would be at a conference with Zeelenberg in London. We
decided we should tell Marcel at the conference so that he couldnt storm out and go to Diederik right away, one of
the students told me.
In London, the students met with Zeelenberg after dinner in the dorm where they were staying. As the night wore on,
his initial skepticism turned into shock. It was nearly 3 when Zeelenberg finished his last beer and walked back to his
room in a daze. In Tilburg that weekend, he confronted Stapel.
After his visit to the Utrecht train station on the day he was questioned by the rector, Stapel got home around
midnight. His wife, Marcelle, was waiting for him in the living room, but he didnt tell the whole truth until the next
day. Eight or 10 years of my life suddenly had another color, Marcelle told me one evening in November, when
Stapel left us alone to talk.

The following week, as university officials were preparing to make the charges public, the couple sat down to explain
matters to their daughters. Are you going to die? the girls asked, followed by questions about two other issues
fundamental to their lives: Are you getting divorced? Are we going to move? No, Marcelle answered. The girls
were relieved. Well, Daddy, their younger daughter said. You always say that you can make mistakes, but you have
to learn from it.
Marcelle described to me how she placed Stapel inside an integrity scanner in her mind. I sort of scanned his life in
terms of being a father, being my husband, being my best friend, being the son of his parents, the friend of his friends,
being a human being that is part of society, being a neighbor and being a scientist and teacher, she told me. Then
I found out for myself that all of these other parts were really O.K. I thought Wow, it must be Diederik and science
which is a poisoned combination.
Nonetheless, she experienced waves of anger. She was furious thinking about the nights when Stapel wouldnt come
to bed because he was working on his research. I said, Its for science, she told me. But its not. She struggled to
understand why he had plied his students with fake data. She explained it to herself as a twisted effort by Stapel to
give his students a perfect research life, similar to the one he built for himself. In doing so, of course, he made their
worlds really unhappy and imperfect, she said.
In late October, nearly two months after the scandal broke, the university issued an interim report portraying Stapel
as an arrogant bully who cozied up to students in order to manipulate them. Stapel broke down after reading the
personality assessment. He was calling for his mother, he was freaking out, Marcelle told me. He was trying to get
out of the window. Stapels psychiatrist prescribed extra medication, and a friend made him promise Marcelle that
he would not kill himself. To escape the medias glare, he went to spend a few days with his brother in Budapest.
Back in Tilburg, Stapel sank into a deep depression. Through the winter he filled a series of Moleskine diaries with
reflections on his life. It was an accounting exercise encouraged by his therapist. Forgiven by his wife, Stapel
wondered if he would ever be forgiven by those he had damaged the most his students and postdocs.
A few reached out. One day in December 2011, Saskia Schwinghammer, a former student and now a researcher at the
University of Applied Sciences in Utrecht, visited him at his home. Stapel wept as he apologized. He reminded her
that she and other students were in no way to blame, that they did not have to feel they should have been more
discerning when accepting data from him. You came up with these ideas, Stapel told her. You designed the studies.
I took away one little thing from the process. Dont let people think that youre worthless because you worked with
me.
Schwinghammer left teary-eyed. It was good to have seen you, she said. A year later, she told me she had forgiven
the man but not his actions. There are good people doing bad things, she said, there are bad people doing good
things. She put Stapel in the former category.
At the end of November, the universities unveiled their final report at a joint news conference: Stapel had
committed fraud in at least 55 of his papers, as well as in 10 Ph.D. dissertations written by his students. The students
were not culpable, even though their work was now tarnished. The field of psychology was indicted, too, with a finding
that Stapels fraud went undetected for so long because of a general culture of careless, selective and uncritical
handling of research and data. If Stapel was solely to blame for making stuff up, the report stated, his peers, journal
editors and reviewers of the fields top journals were to blame for letting him get away with it. The committees
identified several practices as sloppy science misuse of statistics, ignoring of data that do not conform to a desired
hypothesis and the pursuit of a compelling story no matter how scientifically unsupported it may be.
The adjective sloppy seems charitable. Several psychologists I spoke to admitted that each of these more common
practices was as deliberate as any of Stapels wholesale fabrications. Each was a choice made by the scientist every
time he or she came to a fork in the road of experimental research one way pointing to the truth, however dull and
unsatisfying, and the other beckoning the researcher toward a rosier and more notable result that could be patently
false or only partly true. What may be most troubling about the research culture the committees describe in their
report are the plentiful opportunities and incentives for fraud. The cookie jar was on the table without a lid is how
Stapel put it to me once. Those who suspect a colleague of fraud may be inclined to keep mum because of the potential
costs of whistle-blowing.
The key to why Stapel got away with his fabrications for so long lies in his keen understanding of the sociology of his
field. I didnt do strange stuff, I never said lets do an experiment to show that the earth is flat, he said. I always
checked this may be by a cunning manipulative mind that the experiment was reasonable, that it followed from
the research that had come before, that it was just this extra step that everybody was waiting for. He always read the
research literature extensively to generate his hypotheses. So that it was believable and could be argued that this was
the only logical thing you would find, he said. Everybody wants you to be novel and creative, but you also need to be
truthful and likely. You need to be able to say that this is completely new and exciting, but its very likely given what
we know so far.
Fraud like Stapels brazen and careless in hindsight might represent a lesser threat to the integrity of science
than the massaging of data and selective reporting of experiments. The young professor who backed the two student
whistle-blowers told me that tweaking results like stopping data collection once the results confirm a hypothesis
is a common practice. I could certainly see that if you do it in more subtle ways, its more difficult to detect, Ap
Dijksterhuis, one of the Netherlands best known psychologists, told me. He added that the field was making a
sustained effort to remedy the problems that have been brought to light by Stapels fraud.

When Stapels book came out, it got a mixed reception from critics, and it angered many in the Netherlands who
thought it dishonorable of him to try to profit from his misdeeds. Within days of its release, the book appeared online
in the form of PDFs, posted by those who wanted to damage his chances of making money. Unlike Schwinghammer
and a few others, most of his former students have not responded to his apologies. Late last year, the Dutch
government said it was investigating whether Stapel misused public funds in the form of research grants.
I asked Zeelenberg how he felt toward Stapel a year and a half after reporting him to the rector. He told me that he
found himself wanting to take a longer route to the grocery store to avoid walking past Stapels house, lest he run into
him. When this is all over, I would like to talk to him, Zeelenberg said. Then Ill find out if he and I are capable of
having a friendship. I miss him, but there are equal amounts of instances when I want to punch him in the face.
The unspooling of Stapels career has given him what he managed to avoid for much of his life: the experience of
failure. On our visit to Stapels parents, I watched his discomfort as Rob and Dirkje tried to defend him. I blame the
system, his father said, steadfast. His argument was that Stapels university managers and journal editors should
have been watching him more closely.
Stapel shook his head. Accept that this happened, he said. He seemed to be talking as much to himself as to his
parents. You cannot say it is because of the system. It is what it is, and you need to accept it. When Rob and Dirkje
kept up their defense, he gave them a weak smile. You are trying to make the pain go away by saying this is not part
of me, he said. But what we need to learn is that this happened. I did it. There were many circumstantial things, but
I did it.
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee is a staff writer at Science magazine and a contributor to Wired, Discover and other
publications.
Editor: Dean Robinson

A version of this article appeared in print on April 28, 2013, on page MM44 of the Sunday
Magazine with the headline: The Mind of a Con Man.
Bhattacharjee, Y. (2013, April 26). The mind of a con man. Retrieved August 12, 2015,
from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/diederik-stapels-audacious-academicfraud.html?pagewanted=all
Published online 29 September 2010 | Nature 467, 516-518 (2010) | doi:10.1038/467516a

Research integrity: Sabotage!

Postdoc Vipul Bhrigu destroyed the experiments of a colleague in order to get ahead. It
took a hidden camera to expose a surreptitious and malicious side of science.
Brendan Maher

It is sentencing day at Washtenaw County Courthouse, a drab structure of stained grey stone and tinted glass a few blocks from the
main campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Judge Elizabeth Pollard Hines has doled out probation and fines for drunk and
disorderly conduct, shoplifting and other mundane crimes on this warm July morning. But one case, number 10-0596, is still waiting.
Vipul Bhrigu, a former postdoc at the university's Comprehensive Cancer Center, wears a dark-blue three-buttoned suit and a pinched
expression as he cups his pregnant wife's hand in both of his. When Pollard Hines calls Bhrigu's case to order, she has stern words for
him: "I was inclined to send you to jail when I came out here this morning."
Bhrigu, over the course of several months at Michigan, had meticulously and systematically sabotaged the work of Heather Ames, a
graduate student in his lab, by tampering with her experiments and poisoning her cell-culture media. Captured on hidden camera,
Bhrigu confessed to university police in April and pleaded guilty to malicious destruction of personal property, a misdemeanour that
apparently usually involves cars: in the spaces for make and model on the police report, the arresting officer wrote "lab research" and
"cells". Bhrigu has said on multiple occasions that he was compelled by "internal pressure" and had hoped to slow down Ames's work.
Speaking earlier this month, he was contrite. "It was a complete lack of moral judgement on my part," he said.
Bhrigu's actions are surprising, but probably not unique. There are few firm numbers showing the prevalence of research sabotage, but
conversations with graduate students, postdocs and research-misconduct experts suggest that such misdeeds occur elsewhere, and
that most go unreported or unpoliced. In this case, the episode set back research, wasted potentially tens of thousands of dollars and
terrorized a young student. More broadly, acts such as Bhrigu's along with more subtle actions to hold back or derail colleagues'
work have a toxic effect on science and scientists. They are an affront to the implicit trust between scientists that is necessary for
research endeavours to exist and thrive.

Despite all this, there is little to prevent perpetrators re-entering science. In the United States, federal bodies that provide research
funding have limited ability and inclination to take action in sabotage cases because they aren't interpreted as fitting the federal
definition of research misconduct, which is limited to plagiarism, fabrication and falsification of research data. In Bhrigu's case,
administrators at the University of Michigan worked with police to investigate, thanks in part to the persistence of Ames and her
supervisor, Theo Ross.
"The question is, how many universities have such procedures in place that scientists can go and get that kind of support?" says
Christine Boesz, former inspector-general for the US National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia, and now a consultant on
scientific accountability. "Most universities I was familiar with would not necessarily be so responsive."
First suspicions
Ames, an MD PhD student, first noticed a problem with her research on 12 December 2009. As part of a study on the epidermal growth
factor receptor, a protein involved in some cancers, she was running a western blot assay to confirm the presence of proteins in a
sample. It was a routine protocol. But when she looked at the blot, four of her six samples seemed to be out of order the pattern of
bands that she expected to see in one lane appeared in another. Five days later, it happened again. "I thought, technically it could have
been my mistake, but it was weird that they had gone wrong in exactly the same way," says Ames. The only explanation, she reasoned,
was that the labelled lids for her cell cultures had been swapped, and she immediately wondered whether someone was sabotaging
her work. To be safe, she devised a workaround: writing directly on the bottoms of the culture dishes so that the lids could not be
switched.
Next, Ames started having an issue with the western blots themselves. She saw an additional protein in the sample lanes, showing that
an extra antibody was staining the blot. Once again, it could have been a mistake, but it happened twice. "I started going over to my
fianc's lab and running blots overnight there," she says. As the problems mounted, Ames was getting agitated. She was certain that
someone was monkeying with her experiments, but she had no proof and no suspect. Her close friends suggested that she was being
paranoid.
Some labs are known to be hyper-competitive, with principal investigators pitting postdocs against each other. But Ross's lab is a small,
collegial place. At the time that Ames was noticing problems, it housed just one other graduate student, a few undergraduates doing
projects, and the lab manager, Katherine Oravecz-Wilson, a nine-year veteran of the lab whom Ross calls her "eyes and ears". And then
there was Bhrigu, an amiable postdoc who had joined the lab in April 2009.
Bhrigu had come to the United States from India in 2003, and completed his PhD at the University of Toledo, Ohio, under cancer
biologist James Trempe. "He was an average student," says Trempe. "I wouldn't say that he was a star in the lab, but there was nothing
that would make me question the work that he did." Ross thought Bhrigu would be a good fit with her lab friendly, talkative, up on
current trends in the field. Ames says that she liked Bhrigu and at the time had little reason to suspect him. "He was one of the last
people I would have suspected didn't like me," she says.
On Sunday 28 February 2010, Ames encountered what she thought was another attempt to sabotage her work. She was replacing the
media on her cells and immediately noticed that something wasn't right. The cells were "just dripping off the plate", as if they'd been
hit with something caustic. She pulled the bottle of medium out from the fume hood and looked at it. Translucent ripples, like those
that appear when adding water to whisky, were visible in the dark red medium. When she sniffed it, the smell of alcohol was
overpowering. This, she thought, was the proof she needed. "It was clearly not my mistake," says Ames.
She fired off an e-mail to Ross. "I just found pretty convincing evidence that somebody is trying to sabotage my experiments," she
wrote. Ross came and sniffed the medium too. She agreed that it didn't smell right, but she didn't know what to think.
Lab investigation
Some people whom Ross consulted with tried to convince her that Ames was hitting a rough patch in her work and looking for
someone else to blame. But Ames was persistent, so Ross took the matter to the university's office of regulatory affairs, which advises
on a wide variety of rules and regulations pertaining to research and clinical care. Ray Hutchinson, associate dean of the office, and
Patricia Ward, its director, had never dealt with anything like it before. After several meetings and two more instances of alcohol in the
media, Ward contacted the department of public safety the university's police force on 9 March. They immediately launched an
investigation into Ames herself. She endured two interrogations and a lie-detector test before investigators decided to look
elsewhere.
At 4:00 a.m. on Sunday 18 April, officers installed two cameras in the lab: one in the cold room where Ames's blots had been
contaminated, and one above the refrigerator where she stored her media. Ames came in that day and worked until 5:00 p.m. On
Monday morning at around 10:15, she found that her medium had been spiked again. When Ross reviewed the tapes of the
intervening hours with Richard Zavala, the officer assigned to the case, she says that her heart sank. Bhrigu entered the lab at 9:00 a.m.
on Monday and pulled out the culture media that he would use for the day. He then returned to the fridge with a spray bottle of

ethanol, usually used to sterilize lab benches. With his back to the camera, he rummaged through the fridge for 46 seconds. Ross
couldn't be sure what he was doing, but it didn't look good.
Zavala escorted Bhrigu to the campus police department for questioning. When he told Bhrigu about the cameras in the lab, the
postdoc asked for a drink of water and then confessed. He said that he had been sabotaging Ames's work since February. (He denies
involvement in the December and January incidents.)
Motives for misconduct
Misbehaviour in science is nothing new but its frequency is difficult to measure. Daniele Fanelli at the University of Edinburgh, UK,
who studies research misconduct, says that overtly malicious offences such as Bhrigu's are probably infrequent, but other forms of
indecency and sabotage are likely to be more common. "A lot more would be the kind of thing you couldn't capture on camera," he
says. Vindictive peer review, dishonest reference letters and withholding key aspects of protocols from colleagues or competitors can
do just as much to derail a career or a research project as vandalizing experiments. These are just a few of the questionable practices
that seem quite widespread in science, but are not technically considered misconduct. In a meta-analysis of misconduct surveys,
published last year (D. Fanelli PLoS ONE 4, e5738; 2009), Fanelli found that up to one-third of scientists admit to offences that fall into
this grey area, and up to 70% say that they have observed them.
Some say that the structure of the scientific enterprise is to blame. The big rewards tenured positions, grants, papers in stellar
journals are won through competition. To get ahead, researchers need only be better than those they are competing with. That
ethos, says Brian Martinson, a sociologist at HealthPartners Research Foundation in Minneapolis, Minnesota, can lead to sabotage. He
and others have suggested that universities and funders need to acknowledge the pressures in the research system and try to ease
them by means of education and rehabilitation, rather than simply punishing perpetrators after the fact.
But did rivalry drive Bhrigu? He and Ames were collaborating on one of their projects, but they were not in direct competition. Chiron
Graves, a former graduate student in Ross's lab who helped Bhrigu learn techniques, says that Ross is passionate but didn't put undue
stress on her personnel. "The pressures that exist in the system as a whole are somewhat relieved in Theo's lab," says Graves, now an
assistant professor running a teacher-education programme at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti. "Her take was to do good
science."
Bhrigu says that he felt pressure in moving from the small college at Toledo to the much bigger one in Michigan. He says that some
criticisms he received from Ross about his incomplete training and his work habits frustrated him, but he doesn't blame his actions on
that. "In any kind of workplace there is bound to be some pressure," he says. "I just got jealous of others moving ahead and I wanted to
slow them down."
Crime and punishment
At Washtenaw County Courthouse in July, having reviewed the case files, Pollard Hines delivered Bhrigu's sentence. She ordered him to
pay around US$8,800 for reagents and experimental materials, plus $600 in court fees and fines and to serve six months' probation,
perform 40 hours of community service and undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
But the threat of a worse sentence hung over Bhrigu's head. At the request of the prosecutor, Ross had prepared a more detailed list of
damages, including Bhrigu's entire salary, half of Ames's, six months' salary for a technician to help Ames get back up to speed, and a
quarter of the lab's reagents. The court arrived at a possible figure of $72,000, with the final amount to be decided upon at a
restitution hearing in September.
Before that hearing could take place, however, Bhrigu and his wife left the country for India. Bhrigu says his visa was contingent upon
having a job. A new hearing has been scheduled for October in which the case for restitution will be heard alongside arguments that
Bhrigu has violated his probation.
Ross, though, is happy that the ordeal is largely over. For the month-and-a-half of the investigation, she became reluctant to take on
new students or to hire personnel. She says she considered packing up her research programme. She even questioned her own sanity,
worrying that she was the one sabotaging Ames's work via "an alternate personality". Ross now wonders if she was too trusting, and
urges other lab heads to "realize that the whole spectrum of humanity is in your lab. So, when someone complains to you, take it
seriously."
She also urges others to speak up when wrongdoing is discovered. After Bhrigu pleaded guilty in June, Ross called Trempe at the
University of Toledo. He was shocked, of course, and for more than one reason. His department at Toledo had actually re-hired Bhrigu.
Bhrigu says that he lied about the reason he left Michigan, blaming it on disagreements with Ross. Toledo let Bhrigu go in July, not long
after Ross's call.

Now that Bhrigu is in India, there is little to prevent him from getting back into science. And even if he were in the United States, there
wouldn't be much to stop him. The National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, through its Office of Research Integrity, will
sometimes bar an individual from receiving federal research funds for a time if they are found guilty of misconduct. But Bhigru
probably won't face that prospect because his actions don't fit the federal definition of misconduct, a situation Ross finds strange. "All
scientists will tell you that it's scientific misconduct because it's tampering with data," she says.
Still, more immediate concerns are keeping Ross busy. Bhrigu was in her lab for about a year, and everything he did will have to be
repeated. Reagents that he used have been double-checked or thrown away. Ames says her work was set back five or six months, but
she expects to finish her PhD in the spring.
For her part, Ames says that the experience shook her trust in her chosen profession. "I did have doubts about continuing with science.
It hurt my idea of science as a community that works together, builds upon each other's work and collaborates." Nevertheless, she has
begun to use her experience to help teach others, and has given a seminar about the experience, with Ross, to new graduate students.
She says that the assistance she got from Ross and others helped her cope with the ordeal.
"It did help restore the trust," she says. "In a sense I was lucky that we could catch it."

Maher, B. (2010, September 29). Research integrity: Sabotage!, Nature, 516-518.

Fabrication (Sabotage)

Whistle-blower in UK research-fraud case: 'The system

is badly broken'
Faculty researcher blew the whistle on his boss and then lost his job
BY LINDA B. BLACKFORD
lblackford@herald-leader.comDecember 9, 2012

In April 2009, William Everson, a faculty researcher at the Kentucky Pediatric Research Institute at the University of
Kentucky, was helping a technician in the lab prepare a presentation for a scientific meeting. He was casually
reviewing the information from the 2005 grant that the tech was discussing when he noticed that the grant paperwork,
filled out by his boss, Research Institute director Eric Smart, cited the lab's research with special, genetically altered
mice.
The only problem was that Everson knew that the lab mostly aimed at childhood diabetes research had not had
those mice ready for experimentation until 2007 or 2008 years after the grant had started.
"I just thought, 'That can't be right,'" Everson said in a recent interview. "I talked to a colleague and said, 'What do I
do?' A day later, I wrote to Jay Perman (then dean of the College of Medicine) and asked for a meeting."
That email set off reverberations that continue to be felt at UK and beyond.
Two investigations at UK and one by federal authorities concluded that Smart had made up data about those mice on
a grant application, false information that spiraled out to numerous scientific papers, progress reports and other
applications.
Smart blamed Everson, who was investigated and cleared by UK and federal officials. Neither man is now at UK, nor
does Smart's lab exist.
The 11 other lab employees, like Everson, were given a year to find other work. If they were not successful, as in
Everson's case, they were let go.
UK has never identified Everson as the whistle-blower; however, he agreed to speak with the Herald-Leader about
his involvement in a case that has highlighted the long ascent and quick fall of one of UK's rising stars, and the
collateral damage left behind.
Everson remains deeply shaken by the events and what he feels has been a lack of response by UK toward his
claims that Smart sexually harassed employees and retaliated against him for his whistle-blowing by killing the mice
that Everson was using in his research.
"I want my career back," Everson said. "I would like those mouse lines returned. But the biggest tragedy is the
intangible of what we were actually building" in understanding the causes and, potentially, cures for childhood
diabetes. "What we were doing was singular and important, and now it's gone."
'Under intense pressure'
Everson came to UK from the University of Cincinnati in 2003, recruited by the charisma and grant-writing prowess of
Eric Smart, who started out in physiology at UK in 1996.

Just a few years later, UK President Lee T. Todd Jr. would put UK on an ambitious trajectory to Top 20 status, which
included improving UK's stature in the race for federal research dollars. Smart was part of that climb; he brought in
his first $1 million grant by 2000, and he was named the Barnstable Brown Endowed Chair in Diabetes Research in
2003. By the time he resigned in 2012, his grant funding totalled $8 million.
Between 2001 and 2006, overall grants and contracts coming to UK grew from $212 million to $290 million a year.
(Since then, research dollars have increased to almost $300 million, thanks to federal stimulus dollars in the wake of
the economic meltdown in 2008.)
Smart's salary was $164,000, and he also received several rounds of Wethington Awards of $50,000, given to
promising researchers.
Smart's main research was in understanding caveolae, parts of cell membranes that regulate molecular signaling.
Much of his funding came from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and the National Institute of Diabetes and
Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
That work depended on using "knockout" mice, in which certain genes were bred out. It's an expensive and lengthy
process to create such mice, and Smart had not received them in 2005, according to Everson and subsequent
investigations.
But he pretended he had, according to the investigative reports. Investigators concluded that falsified data appeared
in 10 published papers, one submitted manuscript and seven grant applications over 10 years. Fabricated images
appeared in 45 figures in Smart's research, the report said.
Without admitting guilt, Smart entered an agreement with the federal authorities to exclude himself from any federally
funded scientific activity for seven years. Currently, he's a chemistry teacher at Bourbon County High School. He
received his teaching degree and started in 2011, when he was on suspension at UK because of the investigations.
Smart continues to blame Everson. Although he has declined to comment personally to the Herald-Leader, he told
Bourbon County Superintendent Lana Fryman that Everson was to blame for the whole situation.
"His (Smart's) explanation was that Mr. Everson, who worked in that department with him, is the one who did it,"
Fryman said. "He wanted to be named as department chair and was very upset that he wasn't."
Everson said Smart was working on so many projects with his labs and other colleagues at UK that only he had a
clear idea of everything under way.
"Most of the staff were kept under pressure to work hard, and worked largely on projects in isolation from what other
techs were doing," Everson said in a follow-up email. "That is part of the reason things were not readily discovered:
Few people knew the work being done, as individual technicians were often working on multiple projects; work was
'driven by grant deadlines' under intense pressure."
Other employees and colleagues of Smart's have been reluctant to discuss the case.
One of Smart's former collaborators, Haining Zhu, said: "No one ever realized that had happened," about the fraud.
He declined to comment further.
Another researcher at UK, Xiang An-Li, said the whole incident surprised everyone.
"He is a good person and I still consider him a good friend," he said.
As soon as UK received Everson's complaint, officials began investigating. Smart was put on paid leave and was told
to work at home. But at least one UK official was looking out for Smart: his then-boss, Tim Bricker, the former chair of
pediatrics, wrote him a recommendation letter to the state's teacher certification agency, calling him "an outstanding
teacher." Bricker is thought to have also removed a letter of reprimand from Smart's personnel file that detailed his
yearlong probation for sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment in his lab.
Bricker moved to Texas in 2011 and has been unavailable for comment.
'Collateral damage'
Scientific-misconduct cases pepper the academic landscape, from prestigious research institutions to flagship state
schools such as UK. In October, the journal The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published an
analysis of more than 2,000 retractions of scientific research. In three-quarters of the cases, the retractions were
because of misconduct, a much higher rate than was expected.
One of the study's authors, Ferric Fang, a professor of microbiology at the University of Washington, said that fraud
cannot be prevented, but he thinks the increase can be linked to a more mercenary view of scientific research.
"I don't think it can be completely prevented, but it may be appropriate for UK to take a look at what their criteria are
for judging someone's success," he said in a telephone interview.
He compared medical schools today to luxury malls with small boutiques. Each researcher, like each boutique, must
attract revenue.
"If they aren't successful, they cast them aside," Fang said. "The faculty feel sort of dispensable, and scholarship is
not viewed as an end in itself.
"The quality of work is reduced to how many dollars they bring in. If you talk to scientists, a lot of people feel that
way."
Fang said he understands that research universities want to attract good scientists and remain solvent, "but it's up to
one institution what kind of culture it creates. They need to look beyond the mere dollar signs and look at the big
picture. Then they might recognize an imposter like Dr. Smart, who wasn't holding to the values that the
administration at UK say they uphold."

Fang said Smart's case was similar to many other cases in which the person at the top is the only one with all the
information, while technicians are given different pieces of research to work on.
"The people who are working for them who may get drawn into this web are really acting in a pathological
environment created by the principal investigator," Fang said.
Fang also is disturbed by the idea that Everson, the whistle-blower in the Smart case, was let go by UK when at least
one UK employee helped Smart find new employment.
"What kind of message is that for an institution to have this guy who exposes this terrible act of misconduct and then
gets fired?" Fang said. "Whistle-blowers pay a huge price. To work under someone and you slowly come to realize
you were wrong and you have to turn them in, it's a very courageous thing to do and very uncomfortable."
However, Fang said, it's not yet clear whether federal charges will be pursued in the Smart case, as has happened in
similar cases. In at least one past case, a whistle-blower received some financial compensation in a settlement with
the federal government and universities.
UK officials declined to comment on Everson's situation. "With respect to allegations of retaliation, senior university
officials investigated any and all allegations of retaliation against any individual who reported Dr. Smart's research
misconduct. If there was evidence of retaliation, the university took appropriate action," UK general counsel Bill Thro
said.
Jim Tracy, UK's vice president for research, also declined to speak of Everson.
"There is no question if you look at famous cases, there is a collateral damage, and that's one of the real shames of
this," Tracy said. He worked at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where in 2006, six graduate students turned
in their professor, biologist Elizabeth Goodwin, for falsifying data. According to media reports at the time, the
graduate students were told that their work had to begin again because of the taint of misconduct. Several have left
academic research, Tracy said.
"It can be a huge career price for some," he said.
William Everson puts himself in that group.
"The system is badly broken," he wrote in an email. "I doubt anyone cares about what happened to me; but there is
value in telling the story 'for the next person' who finds the unthinkable has happened, and they too are compelled by
professional ethics, federal statutes and of course, conscience, to act."
http://www.kentucky.com/2012/12/09/2437270/whistle-blower-in-uk-research.html

Blackford, L. (2012, December 9). Whistle-blower in UK research-fraud case: 'The system

is badly broken' Retrieved August 13, 2015, from
http://www.kentucky.com/2012/12/09/2437270/whistle-blower-in-uk-research.html

Flawed forensics: Undoing the dirty work of Annie

Dookhan
One Massachusetts chemist may have contaminated more than 40,000 criminal cases;
now the state has to fix it
June 4, 2014 5:00PM ET

by Lori Jane Gliha

File cabinets and legal boxes line the walls, stuffed with manila folders of court documents. Unofficially, its the
Annie Dookhan room, dedicated to the once glorified state chemist who has turned the process of determining
guilt or innocence on its head.
The filing location in the Plymouth County District Attorneys office in Massachusetts is designated for the storage
of paperwork pertaining to ongoing cases tainted by Dookhan, whose job involved analyzing evidence for the
presence of drugs.
District Attorney Tim Cruz estimates at least 1,000 cases in Plymouth County were affected by Dookhan. Thats just
a tiny fraction of the more than 40,000 cases affected across the state, in one of the biggest criminal justice

scandals in Massachusetts history. Dookhans actions allowed criminals back onto the streets, and forced others
to face stiff penalties for crimes they never committed.
I think [her name] brings significant disappointment, Cruz told America Tonight, and a lot of good hard work by
a lot of good people was thrown out the window because of her activities.
Last November, Dookhan pleaded guilty to 27 counts of misleading investigators, filing false reports and tampering
with evidence, and was sentenced to three to five years in prison. The judge called the consequences of her
crimesnothing short of catastrophic.
Now, the state faces the gargantuan task of fixing it.
The contamination
At first, Dookhan seemed to be a star forensics expert who worked at a record pace at the states William A.
Hinton State Laboratory Institute, a drug-testing lab operated by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
For nearly 10 years, she seemed to work quickly and diligently, helping process evidence in drug cases by
identifying and weighing substances like cocaine and heroin. But it would eventually come to light that the star
chemist not only fabricated her credentials, but also her lab results.
According to court records, she handled drug samples without supervision, forged the initials of other chemists,
and intentionally contaminate[d] samples during her analysis.
Sometimes, she did something called drylabbing. Instead of actually conducting a test on the drugs, she would
just eyeball them to guess what they might be.
Dookhans lab results influenced many people to plead guilty to avoid a risky trial, according to Anne Goldbach, the
forensic services director at the Committee for Public Counsel Services, the state agency that defends indigent
individuals in court cases.
It was almost overwhelming, she said. Were faced in many states across this nation with mandatory sentences
in drug cases for increasingly larger amounts of drugs, increasingly bigger sentences.
She added: There are people who plead guilty to cut their losses even when they may not be guilty.
On Aug. 30, 2013, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick shut down the facility while authorities got a handle on how to
address the breach of trust. In Plymouth County, Cruz has assigned extra staff to research and manage every case
that Dookhan may have touched dating back to 2003.
Tipping the scale
Michelle Devlin said she was a drug addict when police found heroin in a house where she was staying in 2009. The
official weight of the drugs, determined by the drug lab, was enough to bump a minor possession charge to a
felony trafficking charge, which meant the 19-year-old faced a possible 10-year prison sentence.
Devlin pleaded to the lesser charge of possession to avoid time behind bars, and served probation instead. But the
fact that she was once charged with trafficking remained on her record.
Devlin believes Dookhan tampered with the drugs in her case.
Devlin said that a private investigator determined the drugs in her case did not actually weigh enough to qualify for
a felony charge. It makes sense when the news then came out saying [Dookhan] tampered with weights, she
said.
Devlins case was a Dookhan case. Her attorney Todd Pomerleau fought to have the original plea reversed, and
won. But even still, evidence of the charges remain on her record, visible to anyone screening her for an apartment
or a job.
Devlin is sure its damaging her future. It just looks so awful, she said. I dont see anyone thinking, Oh its
dismissed, that means she was innocent.
Rewinding injustice
So far, Cruzs office has reported approximately 10 cases that have gone back to trial and obtained convictions.
There have also been nine cases at the Superior Court level, and 64 at the District Court level, in which the
prosecutors determined they would reverse their original decision to prosecute.

But unless the prosecution decides to reverse its decision, anyone convicted based on Dookhans evidence must
hire a lawyer if theyd like to reopen the case.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts believes this long and costly process puts an undue burden on
defendants. It has filed a petition with the state Supreme Court, asking it to vacate all drug convictions based on
Dookhans testimony.
Annie Dookhan went to jail, but they let convictions stand, said Carl Williams, an ACLU attorney who helped file
the petition. That isnt the way. Thats not American You dont get to cheat and win, and I think that really at
the core of this that those convictions shouldnt stand because they were based in fraud.
The ACLU believes the burden should be on prosecutors to go back to square one, and prove the individuals are
guilty. Williams admits that this could mean that some guilty individuals get off the hook, but he said it would at
least be fair.
Not everyone is on board though with the idea of dismissing the cases of 40,000 people.
I think its a terrible idea, Cruz said. A better idea is doing what were doing: Individually putting the hours in
the painstaking hours of going through these files and making sure we can keep some of these convictions.
He believes the vast majority of the individuals involved in Dookhan cases are guilty of the crimes. And while the
process might be costly and lengthy, he argued: Whats the cost of a homicide? Whats the cost of another drug
crime?
So far, theres been one reported homicide that an offender released as a result of the Dookhan scandal has been
accused of comitting. In 2012, Donta Hood had his conviction thrown out after it was discovered that Dookhan had
tested the evidence and testified at his trial. He was released from prison two years early, and last May was
charged with murder.
The murder indictments say that he shot Charles Evans three times in the chest with a firearm, said Cruz. He
shouldve been in jail.
Now, a new mom working to stay clean, Devlin admits she wasnt entirely innocent. I was doing drugs. There
were times that I broke the law, obviously, using drugs and buying drugs, she said.
But she says she believes the fundamental fact of her charge the weight of the drugs that triggered a trafficking
charge was fraudulent.
If they want to be fair, she said, it wasnt fair.
Inspector General Glenn A. Cunha.

http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/articles/2014/6/4/flawedforensicsundoingthedirtyworkofanniedookhan.html

Gliha, L. (2014, June 4). Flawed forensics: Undoing the dirty work of Annie
Dookhan. Retrieved August 13, 2015, from
http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/americatonight/articles/2014/6/4/flawedforensicsundoingthedirtyworkofanniedookhan.html