Scientific Misconduct....From the WSJ blog: Researcher Faked Data in Sleep Apnea Study
More news on the research-fabrication front. Robert Fogel, a former assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, fabricated and falsified data in a study of sleep apnea in severely obese patients, the Office of Research Integrity at HHS said.
The journal Sleep has retracted the 2003 study, titled “Anatomic and physiologic predictors of apnea severity in morbidly obese subjects.” The research-integrity office said Fogel’s changed or falsified nearly half of the sleep data “so that those data would better conform to his hypothesis.” He also fabricated about 20% of anatomic data that supposedly came from CT scans, the office said, based on information that Fogel volunteered.
Fogel, who worked at Brigham and Women’s Hospital at the time but later moved on to work at Merck, told a former supervisor in 2006 that he had falsified the data, the Scientist reports.
“What I did was obviously horrendously wrong,” Fogel told the Scientist, adding this was the only paper on which he’d done this.
“I moved numbers around to make the data look like there was something there,” he said. “I never really thought through the consequences, and once I did this I got myself into a loop that I found I couldn’t get out of.”
Fogel’s fabrications don’t appear as widespread as those of a Massachusetts doctor who allegedly faked data in 21 published studies. Harvard reviewed about 30 Fogel studies and found nothing else amiss, the Scientist said. A spokesman for Brigham and Women’s told the Harvard Crimson that the hospital supports the investigation’s findings.
Hat Tip: White Coat Notes
Check the comments out @ http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/04/10/researcher-falsified-data-in-sleep-study/tab/comments/
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