The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has fired a biology professor who admitted he fabricated and falsified data in a paper, several manuscripts, and grant applications. The California Institute of Technology is also conducting its own investigation into the professor’s work.
Luk Van Parijs, an associate professor, had been placed on leave and denied access to his lab and office after members of his research group reported allegations of research misconduct to MIT officials in August 2004.
During the course of MIT’s investigation of the matter, Mr. Van Parijs, who did not have tenure, admitted he had faked data in the paper. “The investigation has not found any evidence that anyone in his research group or any of his co-workers had anything to do with the fabrication of data or even knew about it,” said Denise Brehm, an MIT spokeswoman. “That’s something we want to make very clear. We don’t want it to cast a shadow over anyone else.”
Ms. Brehm said she did not know what journal published the paper or what the subject was. Ms. Brehm said she also did not know which federal agencies had financed the professor’s work. A paper Mr. Van Parijs co-wrote in 2002 and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows he received money from the National Institutes of Health at least once.
Mr. Van Parijs, 35, could not be reached for comment. His office voice mailbox was full, and he did not return two e-mail messages seeking comment.
According to an article that appeared October 28 on the Web site of New Scientist, a British magazine, Mr. Van Parijs may have fabricated data in at least four other journal articles as well. Two of the papers are a 1998 article in Immunity and a 1997 article in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, New Scientist reported.
Abul K. Abbas, chairman of the pathology department at the University of California at San Francisco, said Mr. Van Parijs wrote the papers when he worked as a graduate student in Dr. Abbas’s laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston. Dr. Abbas said Mr. Van Parijs worked in his lab, studying the immune system, for four years from 1993 until about 1997.
Dr. Abbas said he became aware of possible problems with the professor’s papers when a freelance journalist called him in September. In both papers, Mr. Van Parijs included plots representing data from cells taken from three different mice, New Scientist reported. But upon close inspection, the data appeared similar enough for some experts to say that Mr. Van Parijs may have used only one mouse, and therefore may have submitted fraudulent work. “They look suspiciously similar,” Dr. Abbas told The Chronicle. But “I have at no point made any statement about how that happened.”
For his own peace of mind, Dr. Abbas said he would like Brigham and Women’s to investigate the work Mr. Van Parijs did there. The hospital released a statement last week saying that it “recently became aware of information that raised questions about the integrity of Luk Van Parijs’ research” and that it “has been assessing that information.”
Violating a Principle
According to a written release issued by MIT officials, Mr. Van Parijs’s research focuses on the use of short-inference RNA (or RNAi) in studying disease mechanisms, especially in autoimmune diseases. His work, the statement said, did not involve medical treatments.
“Integrity in research and scholarship is a bedrock principle of MIT,” Alice P. Gast, the institution’s associate provost and vice president for research, said in the same statement. “Research misconduct violates this principle, and MIT takes any allegations of research misconduct very seriously.”
Ms. Brehm said she believed that the paper in which Mr. Van Parijs had fabricated and falsified data had been published. MIT will work with the other authors of the paper and the federal Office of Research Integrity, which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to see that retractions are published.
MIT officials will submit their report on Mr. Van Parijs’s case to the Office of Research Integrity in the next month or two, said Ms. Brehm. The office will have 240 days to take action on it and to decide whether to make the findings public.
Meanwhile, Caltech is investigating two papers Mr. Van Parijs wrote while a postdoctoral fellow there, David Baltimore, the institution’s president, confirmed in an e-mail message to The Chronicle. After finishing graduate school, Mr. Van Parijs did postgraduate work with Mr. Baltimore at MIT for a month or two and then at Caltech from 1998 to 2000. Both papers were published in the journal Immunity in 1999, Mr. Baltimore wrote. He declined to specify his concerns with the papers, writing that they are “under inquiry” and “confidential.”
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 52, Issue 12, Page A13