How do you react when an investigative newsletter discovers irregularities in your CV, your university initiates a misconduct inquiry, and your co-authors move to retract papers? Most researchers do their best to disappear from public view, but if the accounts are genuine, cancer geneticist Anil Potti has a very different answer: take to Twitter and Facebook with enthusiasm.

As detailed in this recent Nature story, Potti has been under investigation at Duke University since July 2010, when The Cancer Letter alleged he had puffed his CV, including falsely claiming to have been a Rhodes scholar. In November, his co-authors retracted the first of two papers. But you won’t find any of that on Potti’s Twitter account, which links to other, unretracted papers and to prizes that he has won (at least one, a mentoring award from Duke, is genuine, according to a Duke spokesman). The account begins on December 29, 2010. On Potti’s Facebook page the earliest visible status report is a post that he has left his job. He adds that he “likes” that.

Potti did not respond to a request from Nature, which Duke says was forwarded to him, for comment on our story about Duke’s early missteps in handling concerns over his work. Maybe we should have tried Twitter instead?