MIT Terminates Researcher Over Data Fabrication

Abstract

A rising star at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the hot field of RNA interference (RNAi) was dismissed last week after admitting that he had fabricated and falsified data in grant applications, submitted manuscripts, and one published paper, the university reported in a statement. The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena has now begun reviewing two papers published by the researcher, Luk van Parijs, 35, when he was a postdoc there. Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital, where Van Parijs was a graduate student, is also scrutinizing his early work. “I thought Luk was an excellent scientist and truly cannot understand why he would fake anything,” wrote Caltech president David Baltimore in an e-mail message to Science . Van Parijs was a postdoc in Baltimore's lab in the late 1990s. Van Parijs did not reply to an e-mail message seeking comment. Graduate students and postdocs in Van Parijs's lab first approached MIT administrators in August 2004 with allegations of research misconduct, says Alice Gast, MIT's associate provost and vice president for research. “There were data that they could not verify the origins of,” says Gast. The university launched an investigation, put Van Parijs on paid leave, pulled his lab Web site off the MIT server, and reassigned his lab members to other faculty. A copy of Van Parijs's home page from 2003 shows that his lab had 17 members. Gast oversaw the investigation, which was conducted by investigators whose names have not been made public. She declines to say which of 22 papers Van Parijs co-authored during his 5 years at MIT contains allegedly falsified information, nor would she quantify the number of grants or manuscripts at issue. MIT, she says, is working with the co-authors to retract the suspect published paper. Van Parijs, a prominent and prolific young researcher in RNAi, was trying to use the method, which can alter gene expression, as a tool for studying normal physiology and disease. The applied nature of his work may have made it more difficult to detect problems, because it was less likely to match other research exactly, says Thomas Tuschl, a basic RNA biologist at Rockefeller University in New York City. “If somebody picks a gene and turns it off, it's only the people who already have a knockout who can say [if] that's the wrong thing,” he says. MIT's findings have put many of the top journals in which Van Parijs published on alert. Immunity , which ran seven articles by him, “will be looking into these cases in detail,” said Lynne Herndon, the president and CEO of Immunity 's publisher Cell Press, in a statement. Staffers at both Immunity and the Journal of Immunology say they learned of the misconduct case from reporters. MIT hasn't yet returned any of Van Parijs's grant money to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). But the university is now beginning to weigh that possibility. “That's definitely one of the next steps,” says MIT spokesperson Denise Brehm. Since fiscal year 2001, Van Parijs had won NIH grants totaling at least $1.2 million. But two of his three grants expired in August 2004, and the third would have expired in August 2006.