Nature Medicine | Spoonful of Medicine

Watchdog names researcher involved in retraction

The researcher accused of being responsible for duplicating images and faking data in a 2006 now-retracted Nature Medicine paper has been named by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), the misconduct watchdog of the Public Health Service.

In the June 2006 issue Nature Medicine, researchers from the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, reported that the autoimmune regulator (AIRE) gene controlled the growth and maturation of natural killer T cells. But three months later, the paper was retracted by the journal after finding that identical flow cytometry plots had been duplicated in separate figures.

“The authors didn’t really have an explanation for the duplication (which also involved cutting and pasting, making it less acceptable that it had been a clerical error),” Juan Carlos López, the chief editor of Nature Medicine, wrote in an email to The Scientist. “[But] they stood by the data and claimed to have the correct results on file.”

According to ORI’s findings, Zhong-Bin Deng, then a postdoc and the second author on the paper, manipulated data to show that the number of natural killer T cells was lower in AIRE-deficient mice than in wild-type animals. But an investigation conducted by the Medical College of Georgia concluded that Deng, now at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, had swapped flow cytometry plots from particular AIRE-saturated or AIRE-deficient tissues for those purported to have normal levels of the gene product.

Luc Van Kaer, an immunologist at Vanderbilt University who cited the retracted paper, noted that two other papers published since Deng’s study have further linked AIRE to natural killer T cell development, suggesting that despite the compromised figures, the conclusions of the paper could still be robust.

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