<< Previous Section | < Previous Page | Next Page > | Next Section >> Case: Data Falsification (page 1 of 6) CAST Patricia Frankel Professor and department chair George Frankel Patricia's husband, businessman Edward Milani Associate Professor, in same department Jennie Foster Graduate student in Milani's laboratory Jim Liu Assistant Prof at Yale, former post-doc of Milani's Jeremy Stoessel Dean Narrator: Patricia Frankel is a harried department chair, scrambling for talent and trying to keep her own laboratory afloat in the face of ferocious competition. She is having a quiet dinner out with her husband, George, a businessman. Patricia: Today, Jennie Foster, one of Edward's (Milani, Associate Professor) graduate students, pulled me aside after a seminar. She told me that she had been unable to duplicate the critical purification of an alkaloid regulator of signal transduction that Jim Liu, the post-doc had discovered last year before he went to Yale. The published paper did not contain all the necessary technical data. Jennie figured that she was lucky to be able to go to the lab's original notebooks. George: The importance of good laboratory documentation. Patricia: But that's the problem. Jennie said that the notebooks were not helpful. In fact, she said there were many erasures in the dataset, the procedural details were vague and it wasn't proven that they really had pure regulator. Jennie said that when she called Jim at Yale for help, he was friendly and offered to look up his personal notes and get back to her in a week. She said that when she related the conversation to Ed Milano, he said he didn't know the details well enough to help her directly, but he was going to take the notebooks home for review. He would get back to her. That was three weeks ago and she didn't hear from either of them. She saw Ed almost every day. George: What did you say to her? Patricia: I told her to be patient. But there's something funny going on here. Why did Ed take the notebooks home? Why would Jim have personal notes? I wonder whether the data in the notebooks supported the conclusions in the paper, which caused quite a stir when it was published. << Previous Section | < Previous Page | Next Page > | Next Section >> Chapter 8 Quick Links Malfeasance and Misconduct Definitions Process Whistleblowing Litigation, the New Approach to Research Management The Importance of Trust Cases Bibliography Chapter 8 Download (PDF)