<< Previous Section | < Previous Page | Next Page > | Next Section >> Case: Data Falsification (page 5 of 6) Narrator: The investigation committee petitioned Yale to request all notes and notebooks that Jim Liu took with him when he left. The Dean at Yale approached Jim but he claimed to have taken nothing whatsoever with him. When asked whether he could prepare a batch of transduction regulator to demonstrate the validity of the process, Jim stated that he did nothing wrong and had no interest in having his career sidetracked, even temporarily. Professor Milani refused to try to prepare a new batch of regulator for testing because, he claimed, the allegation was frivolous. He told the investigation committee that there was no intended deception and that even if the preparation could not be duplicated, the prepared batch was good and the paper remained well accepted. Of course, by this time the investigation had gotten out to the scientific public. Professor Milani's lab was being shunned by potential graduate students, as were other laboratories in the department, which was now considered to be "troubled." The editors of the journal in which the paper was published were disturbed that an investigation was under way. The ORI listed Professor Milani's case among the investigations it was monitoring. Question: What do you think about the refusal of Milani and Liu to attempt to prepare a new batch of regulator and define the procedure? Narrator: The investigation panel considered three questions, whether the notebooks validated the paper, whether the result was correct and whether there was a pattern of deception either prior to publication or after the allegation of misconduct was aired. After much sifting of evidence they concluded that actual evidence of misconduct was too limited to warrant a positive conclusion. They believed that the data in the notebooks were not adequate to support the results in the paper or permit replication but that the reported experiments had been carried out. They believed that the attitudes of both Jim Liu and Edward Milani were reprehensible in not helping to resolve the issue, and suggested that the journal publish a statement shedding doubt on Liu and Milani's paper. Questions: What are the risks and benefits of the journal publishing a comment on the paper? At this point what is dean Stoessel's responsibility? The newspapers have been reporting on the case. What are the institution's obligations toward the press and the principals? << 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)