Ah Nehs are charlatans

[winnipegjets]

Journal retracts study by Canadian researcher, citing scientific fraud
CARLY WEEKS
The Globe and Mail (correction included)
Published Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2015 7:30PM EDT
Last updated Thursday, Oct. 29, 2015 8:49AM EDT

Twenty-five years after it was first published, one of the world’s top medical journals is retracting a study by a once-renowned Canadian researcher after an internal university report surfaced, revealing the paper is the result of scientific fraud.

In an editorial, the BMJ sharply rebukes Memorial University for covering up what it knew about problems with the researcher’s work for years.

The paper, published in the BMJ in 1989 by Dr. Ranjit Chandra, then based at Memorial University in St. John’s, is being pulled as a result of mounting evidence that he falsified information, fabricated study participants and had no raw data to back up the claims made by his research into the rate of eczema among babies who were either breast or formula fed.

The study concluded that eczema rates were low in breastfed babies whose mothers avoided dairy, peanuts and other allergens. The rates were similarly low for babies fed a special hypoallergenic formula compared with those that consumed soy- or cow’s milk-based formula. This led Dr. Chandra to recommend hypoallergenic formula to babies at risk of eczema if their mothers chose not to breastfeed. The study was funded in part by Mead Johnson, which produced the hypoallergenic formula used in the study.

Critics say the incident raises serious questions about problems handling scientific misconduct in Canada, with secrecy and a lack of transparency prevailing far too often. “It is shameful that the university, Canadian authorities and other scientific bodies have taken no action against Chandra,” Dr. Richard Smith, former editor-in-chief of the journal, and Dr. Fiona Godlee, current editor-in-chief, wrote about the decision on Wednesday. “The biggest failing lies with the university.”

Memorial University was aware of allegations of fraud against Dr. Chandra for years but failed to take action, according to the BMJ. Specifically, the university conducted an investigation into his work in 1995 and concluded he committed scientific misconduct in several of his studies. But Memorial did not release the report, even after the journal approached the school in 2000 with concerns over the veracity of Dr. Chandra’s work relating to a study that claimed a vitamin and mineral formula he patented helped improve memory in older patients. That study, published in the journal Nutrition, was retracted in 2005.

The investigators’ report was finally made public earlier this year during a trial between Dr. Chandra and the CBC, which he was suing for libel. Dr. Chandra lost the case.

“This terrible case should prompt some sort of soul-searching,” Dr. Smith said in an interview. “I would have called in the police if I was at the university.”


Richard Marceau, vice-president of research at Memorial, said in an interivew the report was not released because of evidence that the investigators had made assumptions about the outcome. For that reason, it was decided the report could not be relied upon. But Dr. Marceau said the university is currently wrapping up a new investigation into allegations against Dr. Chandra. The new investigation, which has taken more than eight years and was interrupted numerous times, will be published soon, he said.

“We have not been sitting and doing nothing over the years,” Dr. Marceau said. “We can’t change the past. We can only change the future.”

Dr. Chandra resigned from Memorial in 2002. He is an officer of the Order of Canada for being a “leader in medical research” in the areas of pediatrics and immunology, according to the Governor-General’s website. His personal website lists him as president of the Nutritional Immunology & Allergy Center in India. He is also registered with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario and lists his primary practice in Mississauga, Ont. A woman who answered the phone at a number provided on his registration said he was out of the country. An e-mail sent to Dr. Chandra was not answered.

The question plaguing many in the medical community is whether the necessary changes will be implemented so that universities, medical journals and other authorities start to proactively root out misconduct and crack down when fraud or other problems are detected.

“It’s not just Canada, it’s all over North America,” said Dr. Zulfiqar Bhutta, co-director of the SickKids Centre for Global Child Health in Toronto. “There are patterns of behaviour that reflect principally a pattern of getting away with it and principally getting away unscathed.”

There have been numerous recent examples of high-profile scientific misconduct, including the resignation of a researcher at Toronto’s Women’s College Hospital after an investigation revealed she manipulated data in a published study. Another high-profile example of misconduct involves Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a former British surgeon who falsified research to claim that vaccines are linked to autism. His research paper was retracted by the Lancet in 2011.

Journals themselves should take more responsibility for what is published, Dr. Bhutta said, particularly given the rise of publications that publish articles with little or no screening or oversight, often in exchange for money.

Editor's note: An earlier digital version of this story incorrectly stated that Dr. Chandra was nominated for the Nobel Prize in medicine. This digital version has been corrected.

 

[winnipegjets]

Meet Fawzi Razem, who resigned from the University of Manitoba in the midst of an investigation that later found he had committed fraud. According to an August 2009 report in the Winnipeg Free Press:

Concerns about the research emerged last summer when a team of researchers from New Zealand couldn’t replicate Razem’s work — a red flag that there could be serious problems with the original findings.

A December 2008 online edition of Nature said the study made “erroneous conclusions” and there is no evidence to support Razem’s findings.

The university would not initially confirm if an internal investigation was underway.

That changed July 30 when the U of M issued a statement in a newsletter confirming that Razem had committed fraud.

“Specifically, the committee concluded that certain experiments claimed to have been conducted, in fact, were not, and that results were fabricated,” the bulletin said. “This case is a very rare and isolated incident, and there are already safeguards in place to prevent such occurrences.”

The statement said the U of M has implemented sanctions against Razem and that he will “never be recommended for an academic appointment of any kind at the university.”

Razem resigned when the initial allegations surfaced.

Those details square with those in the Postmedia report:

He “resigned his employment at the university concurrent with the timing of the allegations of misconduct against him,” the university vice-president reported to NSERC in July 2009. “At this time, he has no active association with our university; It is my understanding that he is now employed at another institution.”

The university, which had to be “reminded” twice by NSERC officials of the requirement to investigate and report misconduct to the council under the federal research rules, began a full investigation into the allegations in January 2009, more than six months after the concerns were raised.

The investigators, who interviewed witnesses and reviewed experimental data, concluded in June 2009 that the researcher engaged in “academic fraud.”

*The unnamed researcher in the documents obtained by Postmedia had retracted a Nature paper in December 2008. So did Fawzi and his co-authors: “The RNA-binding protein FCA is an abscisic acid receptor,” which appeared in Nature in 2006. [See clarification at end of post.] And that retraction came after, according to Postmedia:

another scientist informed the unidentified Canadian researcher in June 2008 “that her lab was unable to reproduce results from several of (his) experiments.”

That researcher, in Razem’s case, was the University of Otago’s Catherine L. Day, who wrote a letter to Nature pointing out the flaws in the study, published alongside the retraction.

The original Nature paper, published in 2006, has been cited more than 200 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

According to the NSERC documents, the fraudster is now at another institution. The Postmedia report said NSERC had hinted that it was outside of Canada. The Razem in the Winnipeg Free Press story is now a faculty member at Palestine Polytechnic University, although he goes by Fazim Alrazem.

We also found another retraction by Razem and his colleagues, in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), of related work, “Purification and characterization of a barley aleurone abscisic acid-binding protein.” The 2010 retraction notice:

This article has been withdrawn at the authors’ request. The data presented in Figs. 7 and 8 are not reproducible, and there is no significant binding of abscisic acid to the recombinant protein. The data in Fig. 2 are also not reproducible, and it is questionable whether ABAP1 exists as a native protein.

 

[winnipegjets]

Top Toronto doctors alleged to have falsified research data
Dr. Sylvia Asa and Dr. Shereen Ezzat ask court to review claims of internal hospital review, lawyer says

The retraction of two scientific papers and a concern raised about a third written by a team of Toronto researchers have led to allegations of data falsification.

The researchers — Dr. Sylvia Asa, a pathologist, and her husband, Dr. Shereen Ezzat, an endocrinologist — have denied the finding of an internal review at the hospital where they work, University Health Network.

The investigation concluded that some data were falsified in two articles Asa, Ezzat and colleagues published in the American Journal of Pathology in May and December of 2010.

Based on the hospital's review, the journal retracted the articles in their August issue — a move which effectively erases the work from the scientific literature.

Asa and Ezzat, who study the genetics of breast cancer, are refusing to comment about the situation.

But their lawyer, Brian Moher, confirmed he has filed an application for a judicial review of the investigation's findings with Ontario's divisional court.

Moher said a preliminary court date has been set for Aug. 27.

"The doctors disagree with the allegation that they engaged in the falsification of data," Moher said in an interview, adding the application is for "an impartial review."

University Health Network appointed a panel to investigate the two papers at the request of the journal, which began to look into the articles after a reader wrote to express concerns about them.

The hospital's vice-president of research and its vice-president of medical affairs and quality concluded that the papers contained "manipulated and-or fabricated data."

The researchers agreed that the papers should be retracted, though they insisted the findings were valid and could be reproduced, which is of key importance in science.

The August issue of the journal also contains a "Note of Concern" from the editors about another article written by Asa and Ezzat.

That article, published in the journal in September 2003, contained an image that was identical to one used in an article the pair published the previous year in a different journal. That is a scientific no-no.

The editors said Asa later supplied the journal with a replacement image and the article has been corrected.

 

[winnipegjets]

Women’s College researcher ‘manipulated’ study results: hospital president
A senior researcher from the hospital resigned in the midst of a probe that found she had altered findings in an osteoporosis study, the hospital says.

A senior physician at Women’s College Hospital who has garnered international recognition for her research on osteoporosis “manipulated” data of a study published in a leading medical journal, according to an investigation by the facility.

Dr. Sophie Jamal, who until recently served as research director at the Centre for Osteoporosis and Bone Health, and the division head of endocrinology and metabolism at the hospital, misrepresented findings of a 2011 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the hospital said after an investigation that wrapped up earlier this month.

“There was unequivocal systematic manipulation of data on the part of this researcher,” hospital president Marilyn Emery told the Star in an interview.

The study in question found “significant” improvement in the bone density of post-menopausal women who applied nitroglycerine ointment to their arms every evening for two years.

“The findings were made to look more positive than they were,” explained Dr. Paula Rochon, vice president of research at Women’s College.
Jamal, an endocrinologist, resigned her clinical privileges at the hospital last month, prior to the conclusion of the probe. She stepped down from the senior positions she held at the facility last June.

She also recently resigned as an associate professor of medicine at the University of Toronto.

JAMA, the most widely circulated medical journal in the world, is now considering whether to run a retraction.

“JAMA is aware of the concern of Women’s College and will make a decision about (a) retraction in the coming weeks,” editor Dr. Howard Bauchner, said in an email.

Jamal declined an opportunity to comment through her lawyer, Jennifer McKendry. “We do not have instructions to make any comments on your story,” McKendry said.

The investigation found there were no deficiencies in any institutional systems or processes at the hospital, which adheres to nationally accepted research standards.

“Despite that, it is still very important that we look at how we can review everything that we are doing and how we can work to raise the bar to learn from this experience,” Rochon said.

The hospital learned from the University of Toronto last March that something might be amiss with Jamal’s research, and the two bodies together commenced an inquiry.

A formal investigation was then launched in June.

Some 243 post-menopausal women participated in the study, with some receiving the ointment and some receiving a placebo. They have been sent registered letters, informing them that they may have received inaccurate information about the research.

“There is no evidence of negative outcomes for any of these research participants,” Emery said.

Research papers published in JAMA are peer-reviewed. It’s unclear how allegations of wrongdoing by Jamal first surfaced.
U of T spokesperson Althea Blackburn-Evans said the university received an allegation of research misconduct, which it passed along to the hospital, where Jamal had her primary appointment.

Asked if Dr. Jamal explained what happened with the research findings, Emery responded: “No, we haven’t been in that kind of conversation with (her).”

However, Emery acknowledged there is pressure among researchers to get good results on studies and to get them published.
“Having said that, there is pressure in many roles (and) we wouldn’t be looking to that as a rationale necessarily,” Emery said.
Jamal has impressive credentials. She graduated from U of T’s medical school in 1991 and specialized in general internal medicine. She then did a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco.
That was followed by the completion of a Ph.D. in clinical epidemiology at the University of Toronto.

She became co-director of the Toronto Centre for the Canadian Multicentre Osteoporosis Study, a position from which she recently resigned. This is the largest ever Canadian study on osteoporosis, which is following almost 10,000 women.

She has also served on the Scientific Advisory Council for Osteoporosis Canada and a member of the editorial boards of Osteoporosis International and the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research.

She was the recipient of the Canadian Society of Endocrinology and Metabolism Young Investigator for 2012.

Jamal’s research has also focused on the treatment of fractures among patients with impaired kidney function.

She has been the first or senior author on about 50 published papers, some of which are editorials and the others systematic reviews. Most were done prior to her work at Women’s College.

Asked if her previous work is now being called into question, Emery said that’s a “natural question” and one the hospital is now reflecting upon with regard to any work done under the name of Women’s College.

Jamal’s public profile on the website of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario shows her now working for the Appleby Medical Group on Lake Shore Blvd. W. in Toronto.

A receptionist who answered the phone at the clinic said Jamal is in the process of moving her practice there and will be specializing in treatment of osteoporosis.

 

[Leckmichamarsch]

Women’s College researcher ‘manipulated’ study results: hospital president
A senior researcher from the hospital resigned in the midst of a probe that found she had altered findings in an osteoporosis study, the hospital says.

A senior physician at Women’s College Hospital who has garnered international recognition for her research on osteoporosis “manipulated” data of a study published in a leading medical journal, according to an investigation by the facility.

Dr. Sophie Jamal, which are editorials and the others systematic reviews. Most were done prior to her work at Women’s College.


A receptionist who answered the phone at the clinic said Jamal is in the process of moving her practice there and will be specializing in treatment of osteoporosis.

another cheat like Premanjali Gupta the big bluffer at Synthesio...............

 

[Jah_rastafar_I]

What's new about this? Just remember shit skins cheat like this just as a dog barks or a cat meows and you will be fine. You wouldn't be shocked if you saw a barking dog right?

 

[yellowarse]

Fraud by Indian academics is endemic. What is reported is only the tip of the iceberg. Remember this case?

---

Ex-NUS professor in resume fraud scandal in US

A former assistant professor at the National University of Singapore who landed a prestigious position at the West Virginia University (seen in picture above) is now at the centre of a sensational fraud investigation. -- PHOTO: About.WVU.DUE

PUBLISHED
SEP 12, 2014, 8:08 AM SGT
Melissa Sim US Correspondent In Washington

A former assistant professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS) who landed a prestigious position at a United States university is now at the centre of a sensational fraud investigation.

According to his resume, Mr Anoop Shankar, 39, has a doctorate in epidemiology, graduated from India's top medical school when he was 21, was a member of the prestigious Royal College of Physicians and had been awarded a "genius" visa to America.

But US media outlets now report that these credentials began to unravel after West Virginia University (WVU) handpicked him in 2012 for the first endowed position in a new School of Public Health.

In that position, he would have controlled millions of dollars in federal funding and research grants.

What was to have been a routine pre-appointment review revealed that Mr Shankar did not have a doctorate degree, and did not graduate from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi.

What he does have is a master's degree in epidemiology from the University of North Carolina.

The case, among the most serious of its kind, has now also sparked scrutiny into the larger issue of fraud that goes unchecked at some institutes of higher education.
Associate Professor Koh Woon Puay of Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School said she was taken aback by the allegations as she had not found any reason to question his credentials.

"Personally, I did not have any reason to suspect at that time that he was not trained in epidemiology or statistics to carry out his research," said Prof Koh, who stood by the three papers they had worked on together.

The alleged lies were exposed by Dr Ian Rockett, who is chair of the promotion and tenure committee at the School of Public Health at WVU and a tenured professor in the Department of Epidemiology.

But even though Mr Shankar was dismissed by the university in 2012, the school did not address the case publicly.

He was even able to find employment as an associate professor of family medicine at the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond.

Reports say he even published three papers in the last year, including one in the prestigious Journal Of The American Medical Association.

Mr Shankar has since quietly parted ways with VCU as well, and his current whereabouts are unclear.

The university said in a statement: "Shankar was employed by VCU and is no longer employed here."
WVU officials also told NBC News that it would make "a complete and full public statement" when "all the facts are clear and known", though they were unable to provide a timeline.
NUS confirmed that Mr Shankar was an assistant professor with the Department of Community, Occupational and Family Medicine at NUS' Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine from 2005 to 2008, but did not provide further comment.
[email protected]

 

[Hans168]

What's new about this? Just remember shit skins cheat like this just as a dog barks or a cat meows and you will be fine. You wouldn't be shocked if you saw a barking dog right?

We hv to be shocked as our govt does not know abt these cheating shitskins & welcomed them with opened arms & legs!!!!!!!!!!!! SO SAD

 

[Hans168]

Fraud by Indian academics is endemic.
Mr Shankar has since quietly parted ways with VCU as well, and his current whereabouts are unclear.

The university said in a statement: "Shankar was employed by VCU and is no longer employed here."
WVU officials also told NBC News that it would make "a complete and full public statement" when "all the facts are clear and known", though they were unable to provide a timeline.
NUS confirmed that Mr Shankar was an assistant professor with the Department of Community, Occupational and Family Medicine at NUS' Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine from 2005 to 2008, but did not provide further comment.
[email protected][/SIZE]

the charlatan is either here in sg or on the way here!! he will be accorded full professorship!!!