Strip Clubs vs. Academic Fraud

Which is worse?

In mid-2022, we learned that a major article from 2006 in the Alzheimer’s field appeared to have been fraudulent. Notably, the 2006 article was supported by multiple NIH grants (“This work was supported by grants from the NIH (to K.H.A., M.G. and A.Y.)”). The likely fraud seems to have extended much further than this one article, by the way:

A leading independent image analyst and several top Alzheimer’s researchers—including George Perry of the University of Texas, San Antonio, and John Forsayeth of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)—reviewed most of Schrag’s findings at Science’s request. They concurred with his overall conclusions, which cast doubt on hundreds of images, including more than 70 in Lesné’s papers. Some look like “shockingly blatant” examples of image tampering, says Donna Wilcock, an Alzheimer’s expert at the University of Kentucky.

The implications for the entire field, and for human health, are dire:

Early this year, Schrag raised his doubts with NIH and journals including Nature; two, including Nature last week, have published expressions of concern about papers by Lesné. Schrag’s work, done independently of Vanderbilt and its medical center, implies millions of federal dollars may have been misspent on the research—and much more on related efforts. Some Alzheimer’s experts now suspect Lesné’s studies have misdirected Alzheimer’s research for 16 years.

“The immediate, obvious damage is wasted NIH funding and wasted thinking in the field because people are using these results as a starting point for their own experiments,” says Stanford University neuroscientist Thomas Südhof, a Nobel laureate and expert on Alzheimer’s and related conditions.

This 2006 paper was in the news again last week because the authors (except Lesné!) finally agreed to retract it:

Authors of a landmark Alzheimer’s disease research paper published in Nature in 2006 have agreed to retract the study in response to allegations of image manipulation. University of Minnesota (UMN) Twin Cities neuroscientist Karen Ashe, the paper’s senior author, acknowledged in a post on the journal discussion site PubPeer that the paper contains doctored images. The study has been cited nearly 2500 times, and would be the most cited paper ever to be retracted, according to Retraction Watch data.

But what is going to happen to the person who may well be responsible, Lesné himself?

Lesné, who did not reply to requests for comment, remains a UMN professor and receives National Institutes of Health funding. The university has been investigating his work since June 2022. A spokesperson says UMN recently told Nature it had reviewed two images in question, and “has closed this review with no findings of research misconduct pertaining to these figures.” The statement did not reference several other questioned figures in the same paper. UMN did not comment on whether it had reached conclusions about other Lesné papers with apparently doctored images.

Still employed, and still a grantee of NIH? Hmmm.

Contrast this story with what happened to Chika Nwankpa, formerly the Department Head of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Drexel University:

A former Drexel University professor in Philadelphia who allegedly spent $185,000 in federal grant money on strip clubs and other personal expenses has been charged with theft.

Prosecutors announced the charges against Chika Nwankpa on Tuesday.

The former head of Drexel University's electrical engineering department, Nwankpa misappropriated grant money from the Navy, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation over a period of 10 years, prosecutors said.

Nwankpa, 57, spent $96,000 in federal grant funds at adult entertainment venues and sports bars between 2010 and 2017, prosecutors said. He also allegedly squandered $89,000 on iTunes purchases and meals.

Or consider what happened to this professor who misspent some federal grant money “for a trip to Europe for he and his wife, a jaunt to Texas for a job interview and the purchase of 53 copies of textbooks he’d written.”

Or how about what happened to this professor who “improperly used federal research funds to enrich himself and take lavish scuba-diving trips in the Cayman Islands, Fiji and Belize, among other locations.”

***

To take a bold stand, I’m not in favor of spending federal grant money on strip clubs, iTunes, scuba-diving trips, or European vacations.

But I most definitely am against the wildly disproportionate responses seen here.

Spend federal money on personal entertainment? Get fired and likely sent to prison.

Commit academic fraud that misleads thousands of other researchers and many millions of dollars in subsequent federal funding? Not even a slap on the wrist (at least not yet).

This is entirely backwards. At least the folks who went to strip clubs or scuba-diving vacations presumably had a good time and contributed to the local economy, while not harming anyone else. Misleading the entire Alzheimer’s field for over 15 years, and possibly delaying any future treatment for Alzheimer’s, is far, far worse.

It would be a better use of time if federal agencies (including NIH, NSF, and others) spent 100x more time proactively looking for academic fraud and errors, and comparatively less time bothering with minor redirection of funds for personal use. However wrong the latter might be, academic fraud is worse.