Regulating research and research misconduct

 Peer review is a clunky process that often misfires, but it helps to keep up the quality of published research. Much the same can be said about procedures for investigating allegations of research misconduct: they help clean up the research record, but they can also harm the innocent (particularly when accusations may be weaponized against competitors).*

Nature has the story of an investigator whose research was put on hold for four years before the accusations against him were dismissed after a lengthy investigtion:

‘Gagged and blindsided’: how an allegation of research misconduct affected our lab. Bioengineer Ram Sasisekharan describes the impact of a four-year investigation by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which ultimately cleared him.  by Anne Gulland

"In May 2019, a phone call to Ram Sasisekharan from a reporter at The Wall Street Journal triggered a chain of events that stalled the bioengineer’s research, decimated his laboratory group and, he says, left him unable to help find treatments for emerging infectious diseases during a global pandemic.

"The journalist had rung Sasisekharan, who works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, for his comment on an article in the journal mAbs that had been published a few days previously1. The article alleged that Sasisekharan and his co-authors had “an intent to mislead as to the level of originality and significance of the published work”.

...

"At first, Sasisekharan assumed this was a storm he could weather by providing scientific evidence to refute the allegation, which related to two papers he had published with collaborators, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)2 and Cell Host & Microbe3. But then, MIT received a formal complaint of research misconduct against Sasisekharan, triggering an internal investigation that took more than three years and only concluded this March, when he was exonerated.

...

"Although the accusation had a huge impact on him in terms of his reputation, it was even harder for his staff, he says. “A lab is like a family — you have undergraduate and graduate students, as well as postdocs. The culture of a group and how we communicate is what makes it vibrant, and it was terrible to see how the lab suffered as a consequence of these very public allegations.” He adds: “You get really isolated, you stop being invited to things. There was this dark cloud hanging over us because we just couldn’t talk about it openly or defend ourselves.”

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*the postscript of this previous post comes to mind.