Archive for the ‘Ethics’ Category

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A sandwich and a soda (paid for) is Ryanair’s treatment for a heart attack!

August 5, 2011

Ryanair has its points but caring for its passengers is not one of them. From The Local:

 A furious Swedish family has blasted a Ryanair cabin crew after a passenger slipped into cardiac arrest and was just offered a sandwich and soda.

“We want Ryainair to apologise,” disgruntled passenger Billie Appleton told the Aftonbladet newspaper. Appleton’s stepfather, 63-year-old Per-Erik Jonsson, fell ill during the flight back to Sweden from England on Sunday and at one point went into cardiac arrest. According to Appleton, staff onboard were hopelessly ill-equipped to treat him.

“They said he had low blood pressure and gave him a sandwich and a soda. And they made sure he paid for it,” she told the newspaper. The incident occurred about an hour into the flight to Sweden when Jonsson broke into a cold sweat and asked his wife for some water. Suddenly his wife realised that Jonsson had lost consciousness and while she alerted staff, Appleton, a nurse, intervened. “He didn’t respond when I tried to shake him. But after I slapped him in the chest, he began breathing again,” she said, adding that staff only reacted when she shouted for a doctor and that he needed oxygen.

Their diagnosis, according to Appleton, was that it was a blood pressure problem and that he should have something to eat. She claimed that once the situation had stabilised, the only attention they got from the crew was when they asked for payment for the food and drink.

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Posted in Aviation, Behaviour, Ethics | Comments Off on A sandwich and a soda (paid for) is Ryanair’s treatment for a heart attack!

Hacking scandal spreads to Mirror and Piers Morgan’s protests ring hollow

August 4, 2011

The UK News of the World hacking scandal is like a cancer across all the tabloids where the spread is only gradually being revealed. It has now enmeshed the Mirror and covers the time when Piers Morgan was the Editor. CNN – his current employer – is revelling in Murdoch’s scandal but is steering well clear of the allegations against Morgan.

The Independent:

Piers Morgan under fire from Heather Mills hacking claim

The former editor of The Mirror, Piers Morgan, was under intense pressure last night after Sir Paul McCartney’s ex-wife came forward to claim a journalist had bragged to her about hacking sensitive messages left on her phone.  

Heather Mills said she received a call from an executive at Mirror Group Newspapers in 2001 “quoting verbatim” voicemails left by the singer after the couple had had a row. Her comments undermine Mr Morgan’s claim that he knew nothing about phone hacking – as the voicemails appear to be the same as those which he later admitting hearing. 

In a 2006 newspaper article, Mr Morgan referred to hearing a recorded message which Sir Paul had left for Ms Mills while she was away in India. He wrote: “At one stage I was played a tape of a message Paul had left for Heather on her mobile phone. It was heartbreaking. The couple had clearly had a tiff, Heather had fled to India, and Paul was pleading with her to come back. He sounded lonely, miserable and desperate, and even sang ‘We Can Work It Out’ into the answer phone.”

Last night Ms Mills said: “There was absolutely no honest way that Piers Morgan could have obtained that tape that he has so proudly bragged about unless they had gone into my voice messages.” However she said the journalist who contacted her was not Mr Morgan. …

Footballer Rio Ferdinand and TV presenter Ulrika Jonsson (also) believe they were hacked by the Mirror group.

Piers Morgan of course is protesting his innocence but his protests ring very hollow. Paul Staines (Guido Fawkes) has more on Piers Morgan’s hacking knowledge and his “insider” share dealings.

A website called FirePiersMorgan.com has sprung up and claims

Morgan knew about the hacking while he was at the NOTW and that Morgan is named in a Scotland Yard complaint about a U.S. victim of hacking.

CNN is maintaining an uncomfortable silence on Morgan’s many connections to the scandal. It has not mentioned him once in its 100-plus segments on the crisis in Rupert Murdoch’s meda empire. It’s odd because although Morgan has denied he knows anything about phone hacking, he’s probably the best expert CNN could hope to have for commentary on the story. And he’s on the channel every night.

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Posted in Ethics, Media | Comments Off on Hacking scandal spreads to Mirror and Piers Morgan’s protests ring hollow

Medical ghostwriters and scientists guilty of misconduct should be liable

August 3, 2011

I have long thought that scientific publications (and scientific endeavour in general) cannot be exempt from liability for scientific misconduct – at least a civil liability even if  any criminal liability would depend upon the extent of any fraud involved in a publication or in the performance of scientific activity. The liability would obviously start with the scientists/authors but the entire publishing chain including reviewers, editors and publishers and those who commission the science or the ghost writing must carry their share of responsibility and cannot be exempt.

In a scientific context I think ghostwriting – of itself – is tantamount to fraud.

Why cannot a concept of tort or “product liability”apply to scientists?  

It seems to me that the concept of tort or “product liability” should be applicable to the work of scientists and researchers where their work is the result of faking data, fraud or other misconduct since it would be work that “had not been done in good faith”. Tort would apply because the ramifications of their misconduct would extend far beyond their employment contracts with their employers.

Ghostwriting and guest authoring in industry-controlled research raise “serious ethical and legal concerns, bearing on integrity of medical research and scientific evidence used in legal disputes,”  say two University of Toronto law professors:

Legal Remedies for Medical Ghostwriting: Imposing Fraud Liability on Guest Authors of Ghostwritten Articles

by Simon Stern, Trudo Lemmens PLoS Med 8(8): e1001070. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001070

Summary Points

  • Ghostwriting of medical journal articles raises serious ethical and legal concerns, bearing on the integrity of medical research and scientific evidence used in legal disputes.
  • Medical journals, academic institutions, and professional disciplinary bodies have thus far failed to enforce effective sanctions.
  • The practice of ghostwriting could be deterred more effectively through the imposition of legal liability on the “guest authors” who lend their names to ghostwritten articles.
  • We argue that a guest author’s claim for credit of an article written by someone else constitutes legal fraud, and may give rise to claims that could be pursued in a class action based on the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).
  • The same fraud could support claims of “fraud on the court” against a pharmaceutical company that has used ghostwritten articles in litigation. This claim also appropriately reflects the negative impact of ghostwriting on the legal system.

CTV News says:

Academics who lend their names to medical and scientific articles that they didn’t actually write are doing little more than prostituting themselves, according to two law professors at the University of Toronto. …. 

Academic ghostwriting is a little-known practice that finally came to the public’s attention after some popular drugs like the now-discontinued painkiller Vioxx started showing serious problems.

Lawsuits revealed that studies that suggested the drugs were safe and effective were often not written by the scientists listed as the authors. Instead, they were ghostwritten by writers working for the drug companies that make the medications. The scientists listed as authors were offered payment in return for attaching their names.

The problem of course is that doctors rely on information in the medical literature to make treatment decisions. That’s when “ghostwritten” articles can have devastating effects: by swaying doctors to give patients improper and even harmful treatment. ….

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Posted in Ethics, Fraud, Medicine, Science, Scientific Fraud, scientific misconduct | 3 Comments »

Bengü Sezen – A “Master of Fraud” at Columbia University

August 2, 2011

The case of fraud by Bengü Sezen a chemist at Columbia University goes back many years and was a scandal in 2007 and briefly reported back in December 2010 by Retraction Watch.

Bengu Sezen

Further details have now emerged from the Office of Research Integrity and are put together by Chemical and Engineering News which  “show a massive and sustained effort by Sezen over the course of more than a decade to dope experiments, manipulate and falsify NMR and elemental analysis research data, and create fictitious people and organizations to vouch for the reproducibility of her results.”

A Master of Fraud (MFr) and it strikes me that she could probably have achieved great things if she had spent half as much creativity in real research as she did in duping her peers. Fraud by correction fluid in the age of photo-shopping seems particularly ingenious!!

Dalibor Sames: image njacs.org

No doubt there are extenuating circumstances but for this deception to have continued for a decade does not do any credit to her supervisor Prof. Dalibor Sames. Whether Sames has been subjected to any sanctions by the University is not clear. His role has been the subject of many posts and one “inside story” is available here.

The total number of papers retracted by Sames seems to be eight with Sezen involved in 6 of them.

C & EN carries the story:

Bizarre new details of the Bengü Sezen/Columbia University chemistry research fraud case are revealed in two lengthy reports obtained by C&EN this week from the Department of Health & Human Services. The documents—an investigative report from Columbia and HHS’s subsequent oversight findings—show a massive and sustained effort by Sezen over the course of more than a decade to dope experiments, manipulate and falsify NMR and elemental analysis research data, and create fictitious people and organizations to vouch for the reproducibility of her results. Sezen was found guilty of 21 counts of research misconduct by the federal Office of Research Integrity (ORI), which is housed at HHS, in late 2010 (C&EN, Dec. 6, 2010, page 10). A notice in the Nov. 29, 2010, Federal Register states that Sezen falsified, fabricated, and plagiarized research data in three papers and in her doctoral thesis. Some six papers that Sezen had coauthored with Columbia chemistry professor Dalibor Sames have been withdrawn by Sames because Sezen’s results could not be replicated. The ORI findings back Columbia’s own investigation.

The Sezen case began in 2000 when the young graduate student arrived in the Columbia chemistry department. “By 2002, concerns about the reproducibility of Respondent’s [Sezen’s] research were raised both by members of the [redacted] and by scientists outside” Columbia, according to the documents, obtained by C&EN through a Freedom of Information Act request. The redacted portions of the documents are meant to protect the identities of people who spoke to the misconduct investigators.

By the time Sezen received a Ph.D. degree in chemistry in 2005, under the supervision of Sames, her fraudulent activity had reached a crescendo, according to the reports. Specifically, the reports detail how Sezen logged into NMR spectrometry equipment under the name of at least one former Sames group member, then merged NMR data and used correction fluid to create fake spectra showing her desired reaction products.

The documents paint a picture of Sezen as a master of deception, a woman very much at ease with manipulating colleagues and supervisors alike to hide her fraudulent activity; a practiced liar who would defend the integrity of her research results in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Columbia has moved to revoke her Ph.D. …… 

…… After leaving Columbia, Sezen went on to receive another Ph.D. in molecular biology at Germany’s Heidelberg University. At some point during the Columbia investigation, however, Sezen vanished, though some reports place her at Turkey’s Yeditepe University. Her legacy of betrayal, observers say, remains one of the worst cases of scientific fraud ever to happen in the chemistry community.

See also

Julia Wang’s – The Sames and Sezen case, 2007

Chemical Villain of 2006: Dalibor Sames 

The Sezen Files – Part II: Unraveling the Fabrication

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Posted in Corruption, Ethics, Science, Scientific Fraud, scientific misconduct | 4 Comments »

Penn Psychiatrist Accuses Five Colleagues of Plagiarism

August 2, 2011

Update! 3rd March 2012

University of Pennsylvania whitewashes its own psychiatrists

==================================

Researchers names were apparently appended to a draft prepared by a “communications company” working for and biased in favour of a particular drug company!!!

Ghost-writing for German PhD theses is not uncommon and the suspicion has always been around that medical papers about clinical trials of drugs are not entirely free from the influence of the drug companies involved. But ghost-writing of scientific papers by public relations agents of the drug companies and passing them off as unbiased, objective studies is more than just “scientific misconduct”, it approaches fraud. It reduces scientists to the role of used-car salesmen. In fact the ethics of the used-car salesmen are to be preferred. The Universities who employ such “scientists” are not averse to subordinating their ethics for the sake of funding from the drug companies.

Such scientific misconduct is revealed only when an “insider” feels aggrieved enough to break ranks. The point of aggravation usually involves some dissatisfaction with the financial benefits which often flow from the drug companies – directly or indirectly – to the compliant “researchers”. And when Universities  investigate such wrong-doing themselves they usually whitewash themselves. In this case the “whistle-blower” seems to have been aggrieved at having been “left-out”.

One of those accused – Charles Nemeroff – has already been in hot water for not declaring more than $1.2 million of income from drug companies.

From Science Magazine:

Penn Psychiatrist Accuses Five Colleagues of Plagiarism

A University of Pennsylvania researcher has accused five colleagues of scientific misconduct for allegedly allowing a drug company to put their names on a paper that they did not write. But although federal officials have said “ghostwriting” may be a form of plagiarism, which is prohibited, it’s not clear that the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) would act on this particular case.

The spat involves a June 2001 paper in The American Journal of Psychiatry on a small clinical trial of the antidepressant Paxil that was funded by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and the National Institute of Mental Health. In a 8 July letter sent by his attorney to ORI, Penn psychiatrist Jay Amsterdam, a co-investigator on the study but not a co-author of the paper, accuses five colleagues of “allowing their names to be appended to a manuscript that was drafted by” Scientific Therapeutics Information (STI), a medical communications company, that had been “hired by” GSK (then SmithKline Beecham). The complaint also says that the widely cited paper “was biased” in favor of the drug’s efficacy and safety and that Amsterdam felt that Penn colleague Laszlo Gyulai “misappropriated” his data.

ORI should investigate, the complaint says, because National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins recently wrote that articles ghostwritten by NIH researchers “may be appropriate for consideration as a case of plagiarism.” (ORI only investigates misconduct that took place within 6 years of an accusation, but it makes an exception if the accused scientists are still citing the paper; Gyulai cited it in 2007.)

The accused include Gyulai; Dwight Evans, chair of the Penn psychiatry department; and three researchers at other institutions. They include Charles Nemeroff, who in 2008 was found by Emory University to have failed to report drug company income; he is now chair of psychiatry at the University of Miami.

The complaint has been posted online by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a Washington, D.C., watchdog group. Its staff includes Paul Thacker, a former staffer for Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) who led an investigation alleging that Nemeroff and other psychiatrists hid millions of dollars in drug income from their institutions. POGO wrote President Barack Obama Monday to complain that because Penn concluded that a separate ghostwriting accusation made by POGO against Evans last fall was unfounded, Penn President Amy Gutmann should step down as chair of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. “We do not understand how Dr. Gutmann can be a credible Chair of the Commission when she seems to ignore bioethical problems on her own campus,” the letter says.

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Posted in Business, Ethics, Medicine, scientific misconduct | 1 Comment »

New York Post implicated? Told to preserve emails following UK hacking scandal

July 30, 2011

UPDATE! News International ordered mass deletion of emails nine times

New York Post staff have been told by News Corp. to preserve any documents that may relate to phone hacking or payoffs to officials as the News of the World hacking scandal spreads across Murdoch’s empire. The clear implication is that something illicit has taken place at the New York Post – possibly connected with the victims of 9/11.

A memo to all staff from the legal department was followed by another from the editor Col Allen.

The text of the 2 New York Post memos is here – New York Post Memos

The documents to be retained were defined very broadly as:

“Any documents pertaining to unauthorized retrieval of phone or personal data, to payments for information to government officials, or that is related in any way to these issues, must be retained.

Please note that the term “documents” should be construed in its broadest sense, including but not limited to: written material, graphs, charts, files, e-mail, text messages, instant messages, any content in social media, voicemail, tape recordings, microfiche, video and film, handwritten notes, draft documents, memoranda, calendars, card files, appointment books, and the like whether in hard copy or on computer databases, hard drives, desk tops, laptops, thumb drives, disks, backup tapes, or any other storage medium, and regardless of whether the document is located on a company-issued or personal device. It also includes all copies of the same document.

The term “related in any way” should also be applied broadly. If you have any doubt whether a document should be preserved, you should err on the side of preserving it.”

Reuters reports:

In another sign that the phone-hacking scandal may implicate or at least taint News Corp.’s U.S. properties, the company’s legal team has asked New York Post employees to “preserve and maintain all documents and information that are related in any way” to phone hacking or bribery.

The email frames the demand as an effort to demonstrate how seriously it is taking the issues of hacking or bribery, improprieties — both confirmed adn alleged — which harpooned News Corp.’s famed British tabloid News of the World.

“Please know we are sending this notice not because any recipient has done anything improper or unlawful,” it reads.

However, the implication is that something illicit may have taken place. It asks that employees retain any documents “to unauthorized retrieval of phone or personal data, to payments for information to government officials, or that is related in any way to these issues.”

One possible reason is that the FBI has begun an inquiry into allegations that News Corp. newspapers hacked the phones of 9/11 victims.

As for what “documents” and “related” mean, the email asks the Post employees apply the terms as broadly as possible.

Post editor Col Allan sent out a memo to his staff regarding the email in which he says this should not be surprising.

“As we watched the news in the U.K. over the last few weeks, we knew that as a News Corporation tabloid, we would be looked at more closely,” he wrote.

Allan added that all employees must cooperate absolutely and that this edict should not endanger one’s ability to protect sources.

The legal team’s email instructed employees to contact Genie Gavenchak with any questions. A phone call to Gavenchak’s office was redirected to Rubenstein Communications. The PR firm did not immediately return a request for comment. 

In related news, the Guardian is reporting that Scotland Yard has opened up another inquiry involving hacking at News of the World, this time via computers.

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Another plagiarist politician is now appointed Turkish Minister of Education

July 29, 2011

Political and electoral imperatives often lead to people being placed in the most inappropriate positions and being given authority in areas for which they are completely unsuitable.

In Germany, Sylvana Koch-Mehrin had her doctorate rescinded by the University of Heidelberg for containing over 30% plagiarism in May 2011, and shortly after, in June,  she was named EU Commissioner for Research!!

And now in Turkey,   a plagiarist – Ömer Dinçer – has been appointed Minister of Education in Prime Minister Erdogan’s new government!!

Nature News reports:

German politicians found guilty of plagiarism have seen their careers stumble. First came the forced resignation in March of the German defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg – the University of Bayreuth withdrew his PhD thesis after identifying extensive plagiarism. Other German politicians wielding doctor titles were then gleefully been targeted by plagiarism software users. Only last month, Silvana Koch-Mehrin of Germany’s Free Democratic Party (FDP) was forced to withdraw from the European Parliament’s Committee on Industry, Research and Energy after the University of Heidelberg had revoked her plagiarizing PhD. Her predecessor on the committee, Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, had his own PhD revoked by the University of Bonn last week for plagiarism.

In Turkey, on the other hand, a controversial charge of plagiarism has not stopped Ömer Dinçer from being appointed minister of education in Prime Minister Erdogan’s new government. The new government was approved by parliament on 13 July.

Dinçer got his PhD from İstanbul University School of Business Administration in 1984. He went on to build up a high flying academic career in parallel with a political career, becoming chief undersecretary in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s first government in 2003, and minister of labour in Erdoğan’s second government after 2007 elections.

But he lost his title of professor in 2005 when the Turkish Council of Higher Education YÖK identified extensive plagiarism in his academic book Introduction to Business Administration. Dinçer appealed the charge, but it was upheld in court.

On 8 July newspapers reported that YÖK had quietly cleared him early this year to the dismay of many academics. YÖK confirmed to Nature that it had withdrawn the charge but did not provide reasons.

Dinçer has told newspapers that the charge of plagiarism was part of a smear campaign from a supposed network of people, known as Ergenekon, who favour a military coup.

Related:

The Guttenberg syndrome: Another German politician resigns over plagiarism

Plagiarism and the morphing of a Minister 

Widespread corruption within Turkish customs: Bribes pool of $125 million 


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Posted in Ethics, Politics, scientific misconduct, Turkey | Comments Off on Another plagiarist politician is now appointed Turkish Minister of Education

Rebekah Brooks and NoW – another new low

July 28, 2011

The Telegraph: 

Sarah Payne and Rebekah Brooks

NoW ‘targeted Sarah Payne mother’s phone’, a gift from Rebekah Brooks

Sara Payne, the mother of the murdered 8-year-old Sarah, has been reportedly told by Scotland Yard that her phone may have been hacked by Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator working for the News of the World.

The phone is believed to have been given to Mrs Payne by Rebekah Brooks, the former News of the World editor who was forced to resign as chief executive of News International in the wake of the phone hacking scandal.

The allegations are particularly damaging because Mrs Brooks championed the cause of the Payne family and campaigned for ‘Sarah’s law’, a proposal to allow parents to know if sex offenders live in the area.

Friends of Mrs Payne told the Guardian she was “absolutely devastated and deeply disappointed” by the news.

Tom Watson MP – “The hacking scandal is about to nosedive to a whole new low. How could these people do what they did?”  

In the meantime The Guardian reports on the generosity of News International

“Former staff at the News of the World are understood to be underwhelmed by efforts by News International to find them work after they were handed a list of potential jobs which included posts in Siberia, Russia and Dubai”.

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Posted in Ethics, Media, UK | 2 Comments »

Al Gore’s polar bear scientist suspended, being investigated for scientific misconduct

July 28, 2011
Polar bear under water

Polar bear under water: Image via Wikipedia

UPDATE 2! It seems that the famous dead-bear photograph may have been photo-shopped. 

UPDATE! Extracts from a transcript of the Inspector General’s interview with Charles Monnet is available at WUWT.

Monnet comes across as a blithering idiot. Let alone algebra (and let’s not include statistics), Monnet’s arithmetic leaves a lot to be desired!! And he disbursed 50 million $!!! Fraud may not have been the intention – even if that was the result, but this was not science.

Scientific misconduct together with political opportunism is a heady combination.

No further comment needed.

Fed Polar Bear Defender Placed on Leave

A federal wildlife biologist who sounded the alarm about drowning polar bears in the midst of global warming has been placed on leave pending the outcome of a scientific misconduct probe. Charles Monnett is being investigated for unspecified “integrity issues” apparently linked to his report that polar bears could face an increased threat of death if they’re forced to swim farther as Arctic ice recedes, reports AP. ……

Monnett is in charge of monitoring some $50 million in studies from his Anchorage office of the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement. He and fellow researcher Jeffrey Gleason spotted four dead polar bears in the Arctic sea during an aerial survey following a 2004 storm in the first known sighting of bears floating offshore and presumed drowned while apparently swimming long distances. They theorized that bears’ “drowning-related deaths may increase if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open water periods continues.” Monnett’s conclusions helped galvanize the movement to stem global warming, and the drowned polar bears were cited by Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth. Gleason was asked by an “integrity” investigator his thoughts on the bear citation in the Gore film, according to transcripts. Gleason responded by saying that none of the polar bear papers he has written or co-authored has said “anything really” about global warming.

According to The Blaze

Monnett, an Anchorage-based scientist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, or BOEMRE, was told July 18 that he was being put on leave, pending results of an investigation into “integrity issues.” 

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Posted in Alarmism, Behaviour, Ethics, Politics, scientific misconduct, Wildlife | 5 Comments »

At least 8 more papers from biotechnology department at Kalasalingam University manipulated as 2 are retracted

July 27, 2011

There is something that seems rotten at the biotechnology department at Kalasalingam University. Either there is a tradition of faking images or there is little sense of any kind of ethics. I have posted earlier about retractions of papers where Sangiliyandi Gurunathan, the head of the department, was the supervisor.

Now Retraction Watch reports that

Angiogenesis retracts two papers, cites image manipulation in eight, as PI blames unethical students   

According to the retraction notice for one of the papers, “Gold nanoparticles inhibit vascular endothelial growth factor-induced angiogenesis and vascular permeability via Src dependent pathway in retinal endothelial cells” (we’ve annotated with links and citation data):

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editors as it contains manipulated figures.

In Figs. 3 and 4, paper photomicrographs are supposed to represent images of endothelial cell cultures after scratching the monolayer in order to assess migration of the cells. However, the panels do not represent independent data, but instead contain repetitive cell patterns suggestive of digital manipulation of these figures.

As such, this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community and the Editors take a very strong view on this matter, and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this problem was not detected during the submission and review process.

It has been found that other articles from the same laboratory also contain manipulated figures. We have listed those articles below.

Pigment epithelium-derived factor inhibits vascular endothelial growth factor-and interleukin-1beta-induced vascular permeability and angiogenesis in retinal endothelial cells. Sheikpranbabu S, Ravinarayanan H, Elayappan B, Jongsun P, Gurunathan S. Vascul Pharmacol. 2010 Jan-Feb;52(1–2):84–94. Epub 2009 Dec 16. [Retraction notice available here.]

Pigment epithelium-derived factor inhibits erythropoietin-induced retinal endothelial cell angiogenesis by suppression of PI3K/Akt pathway. Haribalaganesh R, Sheikpranbabu S, Banumathi E, Gurunathan S. Exp Eye Res. 2010 Jun;90(6):726–33. Epub 2010 Mar 16. [Cited twice, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge]

Isolation and characterization of goat retinal microvascular endothelial cells. Haribalaganesh R, Banumathi E, Sheikpranbabu S, Deepak V, Sirishkumar N, Gurunathan S. In Vitro Cell Dev Biol Anim. 2010 Jun;46(6):529–37. Epub 2010 Mar 7.

High-yielding enzymatic method for isolation and culture of microvascular endothelial cells from bovine retinal blood vessels. Banumathi E, Haribalaganesh R, Babu SS, Kumar NS, Sangiliyandi G. Microvasc Res. 2009 May;77(3):377–81. Epub 2009 Feb 21.

Pigment epithelium-derived factor inhibits advanced glycation end-product-induced angiogenesis and stimulates apoptosis in retinal endothelial cells. Sardarpasha Sheikpranbabu, Ravinarayanan Haribalaganesh, Elayappan Banumathi, Namagiri Sirishkumar, Kyung-Jin Lee, Sangiliyandi Gurunathan. Life Sciences. 2009 November;85(21–22):719–31. Epub 2009 October 8.

Gold nanoparticles inhibit vascular endothelial growth factor-induced angiogenesis and vascular permeability via Src-dependent pathway in retinal endothelial cells. Kalishwaralal K, Sheikpranbabu S, BarathManiKanth S, Haribalaganesh R, Ramkumarpandian S, Gurunathan S. Angiogenesis 2011 Mar;14(1):29–45. Epub 2010 November 9. [This is the same article mentioned in the notice.]

PEDF inhibits VEGF- and EPO-induced angiogenesis in retinal endothelial cells through interruption of PI3K/Akt phosphorylation. Banumathi Elayappan, Haribalaganesh Ravinarayannan, Sheik Pran Babu Sardar Pasha, Kyung-jin Lee and Sangiliyandi Gurunathan. Angiogenesis 2009, Dec 12(4):313–324. Epub 2009 August 6. [A retraction notice is available for this paper, which has been cited seven times.]

PEDF prevents reactive oxygen species generation and retinal endothelial cell damage at high glucose levels. Elayappan Banumathi, Sardarpasha Sheikpranbabu, Ravinarayanan Haribalaganesh, Sangiliyandi Gurunathan. Exp Eye Res. 2010 90(1):89–96. Epub 2009 October 16. [Cited four times.]

At least one of the papers from journals other than Angiogenesis, the 2010 article in Vascular Pharmacology, has already been retracted. But others have yet to be pulled.

The Retraction Notice is damning and Sangiliyandi Gurunathan cannot escape responsibility for the sorry state of affairs at a new and rather young University. Retraction Watch reports that he blames a lack of ethics with his students but his supervision and guidance are sadly lacking. But the Vice Chancellor Dr. S Radhakrishnan cannot escape responsibility either. I had written to him back in February and he had replied that a high level committee was looking into the matter. I was disappointed then that he seemed more concerned about avoiding future complaints rather than addressing the ethics at his University. Prodding is of little value if his own sense of ethics is not engaged to bring about improvements. I have brought the latest retractions and the sorry state of affairs at the University to the notice of the Society for Scientific Values which has the goal of upholding ethics in the Indian Scientific community and which does advise the Government of India.

But there is a bigger issue here than just the lack of supervision and absence of ethics at Kalasalingam University. Education is a highly lucrative and a booming business in India and private universities have little sense of ethics. There are some small signs that ethics and academic excellence are getting a higher priority but the financial results are still pre-eminent and private universities in India have a long way yet to go.

Capitation fees: The stench of corruption in the Indian body academic

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Posted in Biotechnology, Ethics, India, scientific misconduct | 3 Comments »

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