A Texas stem cell researcher falsified data by mucking around with her results in Photoshop, according to an Office of Research Integrity (ORI) ruling.

Peili Gu, a postdoc in Austin Cooney's lab at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) in Houston, Texas from 2000 to 2007, falsified images in three papers that investigated the role of the germ cell nuclear factor on the expression of pluripotency genes in mouse embryonic stem cells.

Her misconduct mostly involved Photoshop forgery, the ORI concluded. Gu sliced and diced lanes from Western blots to insert, delete, or duplicate various bands and lanes in multiple figures in three papers -- one from the Journal of Biological Chemistry in 2005, which has been cited 6 times according to ISI, and two from Molecular and Cellular Biology in 2005 and 2006, which have been cited 34 and 16 times, respectively.

"It's stupid and crazy really," Cooney told The Scientist. "The work is good and we stand by it, it's just Photoshop [manipulations]."

Cooney was alerted of the iffy images by a Baylor colleague. He then reported his suspicions to the BCM Office of Research in March 2007, which immediately forwarded the concern to the BCM Committee on Scientific Integrity (COSI), Lori Williams, a BCM spokesperson, told The Scientist.

A COSI subcommittee interviewed Gu and her colleagues and forwarded the results of their internal investigation to the ORI, an agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services, which found sufficient evidence of scientific misconduct without requiring an additional review.

"The college supports the findings of the ORI," said Susan Hamilton, BCM's senior vice president and dean of research, in an email.

Gu was fired on March 17, 2007. She entered a voluntary agreement not to serve on any Public Health Service (PHS) advisory boards and to be formally monitored for any future PHS-funded research.

Gu also agreed to request retraction of her 2006 Molecular and Cellular Biology paper and to accept sole responsibility for the paper's falsified data. The two other papers' overall conclusions were deemed sound enough not to warrant retractions, the ORI concluded.

"All of my research findings and conclusions are true," Gu told The Scientist in an email. "Special things happened in the special times. I just want to forget all of these and tried (sic) to start my new quiet life."

Gu was hired on September 29, 2008, as a non-faculty, senior research assistant at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, working under the supervision of associate professor Sandy Chang. Chang "is fully aware of her work history and consulted with [the] ORI and the National Institutes of Health before hiring her," Scott Melville, an MD Anderson spokesperson, wrote in an email.

No problems were found in any other studies, including another first-author 2005 paper from Molecular and Cellular Biology, which investigated the role of another orphan nuclear receptor, LRH-1, in maintaining Oct4 expression, noted Cooney. (That study has been cited more than 50 times.) "We went back and vetted every piece of work," he said.

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