Duke University research fraud settlement: $112M payment to U.S. government | Hacker News Reader

Duke University research fraud settlement: $112M payment to U.S. government

dukechronicle.com

88 pointsdanso18 comments

Retraction Watch has an interesting list of papers from Erin Potts-Kant, the Duke researcher that falsified data, that have been retracted so far [0]. There's still some other papers that haven't been retracted yet so her count of retracted papers will go up over time (it's at 8 full and 1 partial retraction).

According to The Retraction Watch Leaderboard [1], researcher with most retractions so far is Yoshitaka Fujii with 183 total retractions.

[0] https://retractionwatch.com/?s=erin+potts-kant

[1] https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-leaderboard...

That's terrible people keep citing retracted papers, there is one with 977 citations after retraction

https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-leaderboard...

Someone should make plugins for endnote and mendeley so that people can easily check it. Any hacker here wants to help science?

Hunh, that's a great idea! I might do it for zotero if I can find the time.

Edit: ugh, people have talked about this but reactionwatch has no api. I'm guessing their motivations are misaligned. https://twitter.com/bmwiernik/status/1044278851541635072?s=2...

Unless they sell access to it reasonably.

If duke can do this level of fraud, more universities will follow. Lets see which university will be next.

Labeling one person (or even one department) as "Duke" is very disingenuous. It was one researcher who committed fraud. The negligent researchers, as mentioned in the article, are guilty of wrongdoing, but not fraud.

Specifically, a lab tech, not a professor or researcher, who was embezzling from the university while falsifying lab data. So the school’s guilty of not aggressively dealing with the faked data and the research it buttressed — definite wrongdoing! — but it wasn’t engaged in an ongoing conspiracy to use faked data to apply for federal grants. The penalty seems excessive, especially given that federal fines for schools engaged in covering up rape and sexual misconduct (Cleary violations) have never exceeded $2.5mm (and generally are in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars range).

I'm confused, the article does describe Potts-Kant as a researcher, not a lab tech (rather, the whistleblower was a lab tech). Also, it sounds like this was not a penalty, but a settlement, which to me suggests it is simply proportional to the value of the grants given to Duke as a result of the fraudulent research.

I think you are right.

This is more akin to medicare fraud, but without criminal penalties.

It seem like the fake research was used to obtain 100s of millions in grants.

"... A former researcher at Duke University has admitted to faking data that allegedly were used to secure hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants. Duke has also admitted that it knew Erin Potts-Kant, a pulmonary scientist, faked data, but it’s unclear whether that was discovered prior to using those data to apply for grants, .."

She was a lab tech in the Duke pulmonology lab under W. Michael Foster, so not a principal researcher (but listed as a middle author on several papers); the whistleblower was a colleague of hers. In regards to the settlement, a successful FCA case can result in treble damages (which, given that the plaintiff was alleging, aggressively, that some $200mm in grants were poisoned, was ... a lot). I suspect that the settlement was arrived at by negotiating down the set of problematic grants (probably those awarded or applied for after Duke became aware of the scientific malfeasance) and then adding a penalty on top of it, but the DOJ release doesn’t have detail on the specifics.

Medscape published an article a few days ago (below) about this. I was under the impression that there was proof that Duke management knew about the fact that Potts-Kant falsified data. There was also evidence that she did not actually buy supplies necessary to even run the experiments:

>>According to court records, colleagues had questions about whether Potts-Kant had even purchased methacoline, a drug she said she used in experiments. Meanwhile, Duke was trying to control the message. A colleague told Thomas at the time that Duke's research integrity office did not want the case to "snowball," and that it wanted to write any retraction notices.

That would suggest there was no way she could have had the data. Even after they knew the data was bad (or probably bad), it was used by others as well was Potts-Kant to secure additional funding. I think the court couldn't definitively say when Duke became aware of the fraud, but I think they had enough reason to be concerned about the integrity of the data that they should have acted more strongly and been more forthright.

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/910922?nlid=129046_3902...

The whistleblower is getting $33M. That's some kind of motivation!

Lot of focus on the technician, but the lab's P.I. must've been fully involved.

Maybe not. The PI (principal investigator) is mostly directorial/managerial on most grants. Almost certainly the PI was not the person who was in the lab running the experiments and collecting the data.

Isn't it a PI's job to know what's going on in his/her lab?

Yes of course, ultimately it's his or her responsibility. I was responding to the "fully involved" allegation.

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