Another Case of Fudged Data

Last May, two researchers in a laboratory at the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) saw Dr. John R. Darsee, a research fellow in Medicine, deliberately mislabel a set of results in an experiment on the cause of heart attacks in research animals.

When Darsee's supervisor asked to see his primary data, Darsee, who later admitted his falsification, took several electrocardiograms of a dog in a matter of minutes but labeled them as having been taken at different times over several weeks.

Darsee's case is the latest in a string of incidents, made public over the last two years, in which medical researchers have falsified data. One case involved Harvard-affiliated scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital, another involved several accusations of fraud against a former Boston University cancer researcher, and a third involved a fabrication and coverup at Yale Medical School.

When Darsee's falsification was discovered, the Medical School immediately stripped him of all his academic and clinical appointments at Harvard and BWH, Daniel C. Tosteson, dean of the Med School, said in a report released earlier this week. Tosteson also announced the creation of an eight-member review committee to investigate Darsee's case and recommend ways to prevent the same kind of thing from recurring.

When confronted with the fabricated results, Darsee admitted that his actions constituted "serious misconduct," Tosteson's report stated.

Darsee had received an annual $14,000 salary and a $2000 allowance for lab and equipment costs as part of a three year, post-graduate fellowship from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He was completing the second year of the fellowship when the data fabrications were discovered.

"Normally [Darsee's fellowship] would have been renewed automatically," Dr. Jerome G. Green, chairman of the NIH department that granted the fellowship, said this week. He added that BWH officials requested in June that the grant be revoked.

Despite Darsee's loss of his position at BWH and his fellowship his superiors are allowing him to remain in the lab where the experiement took place while the inquiry into his work is underway.