A faked gene therapy experiment last week came back to haunt Ilya Koltover, an up-and-coming investigator who currently teaches at Northwestern University. The Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Research Integrity (ORI) announced a disciplinary ruling against the biomaterials specialist on Thursday (October 30), claiming that he plagiarized and falsified data as part of a larger research proposal for the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Under a Voluntary Exclusion Agreement with the ORI, Koltover will be under the watchful eye of government funding agencies for the next 3 years, should he plan to conduct research with Public Health Service money. His reprimand comes against a backdrop of rising misconduct allegations but fewer disciplinary rulings by ORI in recent years.

"We consider all cases of misconduct as serious," said ORI Director Clarence Pascal. But since the stunt did not prompt further problems, such as a long string of journal retractions, the agency is essentially giving the young investigator a rare second chance.

"This is a rehabilitative sanction that allows the researcher to restore his credibility," Pascal explained, "as long as an institution is willing to hire him, of course."

The action stems from Koltover's postdoctoral work at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he was attempting to design a synthetic delivery system that could ferry genes to a specific molecular target. According to the ORI, Koltover lifted a key technique from a graduate student and then passed it off as his own supped-up version, which targeted a different molecule than the original experiment had done.

Koltover, who joined Northwestern's Department of Materials Science & Engineering nearly two years ago, declined to comment on the allegations. Alan Cubbage, a spokesman for Northwestern, said that the university was not aware of the allegations when they hired Kolotover, but after hearing of the trouble earlier this year, the school launched its own investigation, which is ongoing.

The ORI ruling represents the first stumbling block in what has been a quickly accelerating career. Blending chemistry with genetics, Koltover graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and headed west, finding work in prestigious labs at Caltech and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

His efforts at modifying biomaterials that can better deliver DNA to cells have been published in Science, among other leading journals, and he holds a patent for a method to shrink lipid complexes down to nanometer scale. After his stint in the California labs, he landed an assistant professorship at top-ranked Northwestern, where he has received several young investigator awards.

One former colleague, Cyrus R. Safinya of the University of California, Santa Barbara, told The Scientist that he is continually impressed by Koltover's work.

"He's an outstanding scientist," said Safinya, a leading biomaterials expert who has coauthored several papers with Koltover. Although Safinya admitted that he is unfamiliar with the circumstances behind the misconduct charges, he said that any attempt by Koltover to cheat in his lab would have been caught by other researchers on the team who replicate each experiment.

"I'm sure he will continue to do good work," said Safinya, dismissing any possible wrongdoing by Koltover as a one-time mistake at most.

But Kenneth D. Pimple, director of the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions at Indiana University, said that Koltover's misconduct should give others pause.

"This is as serious as it gets," said Pimple. "It's a betrayal to everyone he worked with."

Still, Koltover appears to be in growing company. Although specific numbers on research misconduct are impossible to come by, allegations reported to the ORI have risen for the past 4 years in row, resulting in more than twice as many investigations last year than in 1998.

The number of violators being punished, however, is failing to keep pace. The ORI has issued only five disciplinary rulings so far in 2003, compared with an average of 15 in years past.

"We've had a backlog of cases," said Pascal, adding that staff changes have now been made in order to pursue more investigations.

Even so, both Pimple and Pascal caution that too-aggressive enforcement would probably hurt biomedical research as much as help it.

"Scientists excel in an open and creative environment, and if you stifle that, you stifle science," said Pimple.

Rooting out misconduct, they argue, will likely come from efforts to identify and mentor high-risk candidates, such as young investigators who are competing for tenure or sparse research money.

In the past 20 years, the National Institutes of Health has turned down roughly two thirds of all grant proposals, Pimple noted. "This kind of competition creates temptations to overstate claims and make up data when applying for grants."

Despite the indiscretion on his first application to NSF, Koltover is the lead investigator on a $400,000 grant from the same government agency to study new materials for nanotechnology.

Pascal said that the grant is not subject to the type of ORI monitoring that would greet Koltover if he received the money from the Public Health Service. It is up to the individual funding groups, and to Koltover himself, to ensure that he does not make the same mistake again, Pascal said.

James Kroll, NSF's lead investigator for misconduct, said that the agency does not comment on individual cases, but agreed that keeping close tabs on a problematic researcher can be effective. "I think it's a pretty good mechanism for preventing more problems," he said.