Deception by Researchers Relatively Rare

Last year, a University of Vermont nutrition researcher who had millions of dollars in federal grants pleaded guilty to faking research on menopause and aging.

In the 1990s, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory falsely claimed they had discovered two atomic elements. In the 1980s there was John Darsee, the Harvard cardiologist who filled more than 100 journal articles with phony data.

And virtually every scientist today knows of William Summerlin, the brazen Memorial Sloan-Kettering scientist who in the 1970s blackened his white mice with a permanent marker to make it look as if skin transplants from black mice had been successful.

Even Gregor Mendel, the revered Austrian monk, is today widely believed to have cooked his numbers and not just his peas, which he used to derive the principles of modern genetics.

"Misconduct has been around forever," said Chris Pascal, director the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), an arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Although the number of allegations has grown in recent years, no one knows whether the actual prevalence of misconduct has changed much. Less than one-quarter of the allegations ORI receives advance to formal inquiries, and the office makes fewer than a dozen findings of misconduct in a typical year.

Many and perhaps most instances occur under the radar, Pascal and others acknowledge. Among them may be some of the many cases that are reported but go uninvestigated because they fall outside ORI's jurisdiction, which is limited to science supported by public health service funds. (Other offices, including one at the National Science Foundation, cover other realms of federal science but handle far fewer cases than ORI.) Periodic changes in the federal definition of research misconduct -- the current definition encompasses "fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism" -- have also made it difficult to detect trends or determine whether scientists are any more or less dishonest than, say, corporate executives or politicians.

When scientists do engage in misconduct, however, they tend to follow familiar patterns.

· Last October, ORI concluded that Xiaowu Li of the University of California at San Francisco falsified three images in a published paper by using old photos of mouse melanoma cells and saying they were human pancreatic cancer cells.

· Last June, ORI found that Jason W. Lilly of the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University electronically replicated the image of a single genetic assay and then altered the copies so they would appear to be multiple assays.

· In November 2004, ORI found that Ali Sultan of the Harvard School of Public Health plagiarized from another researcher's work and, when he came under suspicion, fabricated portions of an e-mail from his postdoctoral student in an apparent effort to falsely implicate the student.

· In September 2004, ORI determined that Charles N. Rudick of Northwestern University used a photo-altering program to change the appearance of recorded nerve signals.