Following Gay's resignation for alleged plagiarism, doctors with Harvard Medical School accused of falsifying research data

On the heels of accusations of plagiarism against former Harvard President Claudine Gay, four senior research scientists with faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School have been accused of manipulating data in some of their published research, prompting retractions of several articles and corrections in dozens more.

On January 2, the same day that Gay resigned as president of Harvard amid accusations that she had committed 50 separate instances of plagiarism, Sholto David, a British scientist with a doctorate in cellular and molecular biology from Newcastle University, published a detailed blog post accusing the Harvard-affiliated researchers of "data forgery."

"As the whole world furiously argues over whether the president of Harvard did or didn’t use some quotation marks in the right place," David wrote, "... far worse skeletons than plagiarism lurk in the archives" of four prominent researchers with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a Harvard teaching hospital in Boston: CEO Dr. Laurie Glimcher, chief operating officer Dr. William Hahn, director of the Clinical Investigator Research Program Dr. Irene Ghobrial, and Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center program director Dr. Kenneth Anderson.

In general, David has accused Glimcher, Hahn, Ghobrial, and Anderson of manipulating and in some cases even copying and pasting images in 57 total published manuscripts, an act of deception that David called "the last resort of a failed scientist after every other trick failed to provide the desired result." David's post also includes many images from the four scientists' work and clearly identifies in them what he believes to be instances of photoshopping or "image duplications."

David, whom the New York Post described as a "data sleuth," uses a lot of arcane language directed at a particular audience well versed in research data, making parsing through the accusations difficult for lay readers. However, his accusations alarmed DFCI to such an extent that the accused researchers have already "taken prompt and decisive action" to retract six of the 57 papers with allegedly doctored images and to correct their work in 31 others, DFCI Research Integrity Officer Barrett J. Rollins told the Harvard Crimson.

While Rollins admitted that at least 38 of the articles mentioned by David contain "potential data errors," he cautioned that those errors may not have been as ethically egregious as David makes them out to be. "Presence of image discrepancies in a paper is not evidence of an author’s intent to deceive. That conclusion can only be drawn after a careful, fact-based examination which is an integral part of our response," Rollins insisted.

"Our experience is that errors are often unintentional and do not rise to the level of misconduct," he added.

Rollins also claimed that DFCI had already begun investigating some of the research before David's post, that three papers mentioned by David contained no errors and therefore "required no further action," and that 16 others contained research conducted at laboratories not affiliated with the four DCFI scientists. "Where possible, the heads of all of the other laboratories have been contacted and we will work with them to see that they correct the literature as warranted," Rollins said.

"We are committed to a culture of accountability and integrity," Rollins added. "Every inquiry about research integrity is examined fully."

David, however, stands by his work. "You’ve got a cluster of people at one institution with image problems," he said, according to U.S. News and World Report. "How many mistakes are we happy with people making and just kind of saying, 'That’s an innocent error'?"

Glimcher, Hahn, Ghobrial, and Anderson did not respond to David's or the New York Post's request for comment. The Post also reached out to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for comment.

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