Neuroscientist censured for misconduct

A researcher at the University of Puerto Rico was censured last week by the NIH Office of Research Integrity for work he conducted as a postdoc at Dartmouth College between 1997 and 2000.

According to a notice published in the Federal Register on August 14, Juan Carlos Jorge-Rivera "knowingly and intentionally falsified" data in 11 experiments measuring neurophysiological activity of GABAnergic currents in response to anabolic steroids. The resulting publication contained falsified data in two figures, according to the notice. Jorge-Rivera told The Scientist that the paper is in the process of being retracted. It has been cited 30 times.

According to the ORI notice, Jorge-Rivera is ineligible to receive funding from any Federal agency between January 11, 2007, and January 11, 2009. For three years following, he will be required to submit "a certification that the data he provides are based on actual experiments or are otherwise legitimately derived" along with any grant applications or manuscripts. He is also prohibited from serving on peer review committees or consulting with the Public Health Service, parent agency of the NIH, between June 23, 2007, and June 22, 2010.

Jorge-Rivera said he accepts the findings of the investigation, but insisted that although he made errors in the experiments, he did not intentionally falsify the data in question.

Jorge-Rivera worked as a postdoc in the lab of Leslie Henderson at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, from 1997 to 2000. In January, 2001, he returned to the University of Puerto Rico, where he had studied as an undergraduate, and where he is now an associate professor in the department of anatomy and neurobiology.

Henderson declined to comment, and the university declined to discuss the case. "Dartmouth expects its researchers to report their findings honestly and ethically. Dartmouth cooperated fully with this investigation," a university official wrote in an Email statement to The Scientist.

Jorge-Rivera said he first learned of the case against him was when he received a letter from Dartmouth in the Spring of 2003, which stated that Henderson had reason to believe he had falsified data.

Jorge-Rivera traveled to Dartmouth that Fall to meet with the committee investigating the case and go over their findings, he said. Afterwards, he and Henderson went over the data "trace by trace" in a separate meeting in her office.

"Leslie has scientific reason to believe That data [are] not true," he said, because when others tried to replicate the results, "they couldn't see the modulations I was claiming."

In the study, Jorge-Rivera and a student in the lab transfected human embryonic kidney cells with different GABA A subunits and then exposed the cells to agonists. "Everything was done by hand. The timing, when I changed tubing from one solution to another, sometimes was not sufficient to allow the drug to be perfused."

Also, because the signal was small, he explained, he amplified it to see the recording. But when the data were pooled, recordings with different gains were mistakenly combined in the analysis. Although recordings from only a small number of cells were flawed, he said, a disproportionate number of those traces made up the data in the two questionable figures in the paper.

After the meeting at Dartmouth, Jorge-Rivera said, he received a letter from the university saying that the committee had found there were "human errors" in the work, but cleared him of misconduct.

But he then received a letter from the NSF, which had funded his postdoc, informing him that the agency was conducting a formal investigation of misconduct. A letter from the NIH stating that agency was aware of the charges followed a few months later, he said.

He responded to the NSF's charges, he said, and a committee then flew out to Puerto Rico to interview him in an all-day meeting. In January of this year, he received a letter from the NSF stating he had been found guilty of misconduct.

Although the experiments "could have been done better," Jorge-Rivera said, he was unable to demonstrate to the committee that he had not manipulated the data. "If it's difficult to prove misconduct, it's equally difficult to prove otherwise," he said.


Alla Katsnelson
mail@the-scientist.com

Editor's note (posted August 20): An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Juan Carlos Jorge-Rivera first received a letter informing him of Dartmouth's investigation in April, 2004. We regret the error.

Links within this article:

Federal Register notice of misconduct findings
http://thefederalregister.com/d.p/2007-08-14-E7-15881

J.C. Jorge-Rivera et al., "Anabolic steroids induce region-and subunit-specific modulations of GABA receptor mediated currents in the rat forebrain," Journal of Neurophysiology, June, 2000.
http://www.the-scientist.com/pubmed/10848550

Leslie Henderson
physiol/faculty/henderson.html'>http://www.dartmouth.edu/_{physiol/faculty/henderson.html}