Researcher suspended for falsifying data
Postdoctoral fellow Kristin Roovers was suspended after learning that she had manipulated and falsified data published in several papers. Roovers was hired by the institute in 2005. But in July 2007, the US Office of Research Integrity concluded that Roovers, while a graduate student and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, had manipulated 19 panels of western blot data. She had used Photoshop to copy a set of bands and paste them into other blots representing data from different experiments. The data ultimately appeared in 11 figures in three publications.
Two of the papers (K. Roovers and R. K. Assoian Mol. Cell. Biol. 23, 4283–4294; 2003, and K. Roovers et al. Dev. Cell 5, 273–284; 2003) have been retracted. A decision on the third (C. F. Welsh et al. Nature Cell Biol. 3, 950–957; 2001) is pending. The Office of Research Integrity barred Roovers from receiving any US government grants for five years.
