Erstwhile Medical School Professor Falsified Sleep Study Data

A former Harvard Medical School professor has been disciplined by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for falsifying as much as half of the data he used for a Harvard study on sleep apnea in morbidly obese patients.

As part of a voluntary settlement agreement with Health and Human Services, Robert B. Fogel will not be allowed to serve the U.S. Public Health Service in any advisory capacity for three years. All research affiliated with Fogel funded through the Public Health Service during this period will be subject to supervision.

The fabricated data was published in the journal SLEEP in 2003. That publication retracted the article last week, citing a notification from the HMS Dean for Faculty and Research Integrity stating that data in the article was fabricated and falsified. The other co-authors of the tainted study were not involved in the fabrication, according to the journal’s retraction.

Fogel was the former co-director of the Fellowship in Sleep Medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a former associate professor of medicine at the Medical School, according to the Federal Register’s log of the case.

The ruling on Fogel’s guilt was precipitated by his initial oral admission to his mentor, clinical professor of medicine David P. White, in the fall of 2006.

White said that before the project was completed, Fogel went to work for the pharmaceutical giant, Merck.

During that time, White said he tried to get Fogel to write up his findings from the study for a year, but the information was not forthcoming. Finally, White said, Fogel called him to say that he had fabricated some of the data in the study.

White realized that some of Fogel’s data had been published in an earlier cross-sectional study published in the journal SLEEP, and Fogel confirmed that the fabricated research was included in the published report.

After that, White said, there was a massive investigation to make sure that other data produced by Fogel had not been fabricated.

Fogel falsified data so that it would “better conform to his hypothesis,” according to the Register, which was released April 2. He also fabricated approximately 20 percent of the “anatomic data that were supposedly obtained from Computed Tomography (CT) images” in the study.

White said that though he is not entirely sure what drove Fogel to fabricate data, he suspects that he felt pressured by the imperative to publish.

“He wanted the data to come out to meet the hypothesis,” White said. “It wasn’t coming out that way, so he made it come out that way.”

White said that an investigation on the infraction at Harvard moved glacially, taking two to three years.

“It’s very sad that it happened and it does cause a lot of consternation and anguish,” White said. “I hope I never have to deal with it again.”

Kevin C. Myron, a spokesperson for Brigham and Women’s Hospital, wrote in an e-mailed statement that Fogel left the hospital in 2004, and the hospital supports the investigation’s findings.

David J. Cameron, a Medical School spokesman, declined to comment on the investigation.

—Staff writer Laura G. Mirviss can be reached at lmirviss@fas.harvard.edu.