Fall of top US scientists points to ethics gap in research

WASHINGTON: Three prominent US scientists have been pushed to resign over the past 10 days after damning revelations about their methods, a sign of greater vigilance and decreasing tolerance for misconduct within the research community.

The most spectacular fall concerned Jose Baselga, chief medical officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He authored hundreds of articles on cancer research.Investigative journalism group ProPublica and The New York Times revealed on September 8 that Baselga failed to disclose in dozens of research articles that he had received millions of dollars from pharmaceutical and medical companies.

Such declarations are generally required by scientific journals.Links between a doctor leading a clinical trial and manufacturers of drugs or medical equipment used in the study can influence the methodology and ultimately the results. But journals don´t themselves verify the thoroughness of an author´s declarations. Caught up in the scandal, Baselga resigned on September 13. Pizza expert - Next came the case of Brian Wansink, director of the Food and Brand Lab at the prestigious Cornell University. He made his name thanks to studies that garnered plenty of media attention, including on pizza, and the appetites of children. His troubles began last year when scientific sleuths discovered anomalies and surprisingly positive results in dozens of his articles.

In February, BuzzFeed published messages in which Wansink encouraged a researcher to extract from her data results more likely to go “viral.” After a yearlong inquiry, Cornell announced on Thursday that Wansink committed “academic misconduct in his research and scholarship,” describing a litany of problems with his results and methods.

He is set to resign at the end of the academic year, but from now on will no longer teach there. Wansink denied all fraud, but 13 of his articles have already been withdrawn by journals.

In the final case, Gilbert Welch, a professor of public health at Dartmouth College, resigned last week. The university accused him of plagiarism in an article published in The New England Journal of Medicine, the most respected American medical journal.

“The good news is that we are finally starting to see a lot of these cases become public,” said Ivan Oransky co-founder of the site Retraction Watch, a project of the Center for Scientific Integrity that keeps tabs on retractions of research articles in thousands of journals.