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Following five years of scrutiny, more than ten retractions, multiple settled lawsuits, and medical board reprimands, we may finally have some resolution on the case of Anil Potti, the once-rising cancer research star who resigned from Duke in 2010. While there have been numerous allegations of misconduct in Potti’s work, and strong comments to that effect by […]
The post It’s official: Anil Potti faked cancer research data, say Feds appeared first on Retraction Watch.
Posted by in anil potti retractions
A lawsuit filed in October 2011 against Duke University and Anil Potti, who has retracted 11 papers and corrected a number of others amidst investigation into his work, has been settled, Retraction Watch has learned. Potti resigned from Duke in 2010 following questions about his work, and revelations that he had lied on grant applications […]
The post Malpractice case against Duke, Anil Potti settled appeared first on Retraction Watch.
Posted by in anil potti retractions, law, united states
Posted by in anil potti retractions, duke retractions
As expected, ten Retraction Watch posts about Anil Potti that were mistakenly removed for a false Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice have been restored.
Automattic, which runs WordPress, notified us tonight of the move, which comes two weeks after the original notice. The claim against Retraction Watch was ridiculous, of course; a site in India plagiarized our posts, then claimed we had violated their copyright. That site, perhaps not surprisingly, has been taken down.
In the meantime, another site has been hit with a DMCA notice for a post about Potti, and Potti has told us that he had nothing to do with the takedown notice filed against us.
If you missed those posts — one of which is an accounting of Potti’s retraction record so far — here they are:
As we learned, Automattic’s process, which many people found maddening, was necessary for them to retain their “safe harbor” status — otherwise, they would be liable for damages following a successful copyright infringement claim, and shut down sites completely. Some have suggested that having the blog hosted somewhere other than WordPress would prevent future such attacks, but our understanding is that any host would do the same thing if it wanted to maintain its safe harbor status.
Thanks to all of our loyal readers for your support, and to a number of news outlets and blogs that covered the story. We want to also thank Quinn Heraty, a terrific lawyer in New York who we’d heartily recommend for anyone facing similar issues.
Posted by in anil potti retractions
We have an update on an evolving and puzzling story involving our posts about Anil Potti that have been temporarily removed from Retraction Watch.
Someone claiming to be Anil Potti — and whom we have good reason to believe is actually him, for reasons we’ll get into — emailed us tonight to say that he had “no part whatsoever” in the takedown of Retraction Watch posts about him:
I don’t know who is and why they are doing this.
Potti offered a few possibilities, which have certainly occurred to us too. The person behind the takedown notices might be
someone who has an agenda and just wants to keep my name in the limelight, or some “well wisher” who thinks he/she is helping me by doing this…
Potti also said that the online reputation manager service that he reportedly hired was actually the effort of one such well-wisher. That service was terminated last year at his request, he said, and the people who hired them did not know anything about the takedown notices either.
As Retraction Watch readers can understand, we wanted some proof that this was actually Potti emailing us. While there’s really no way to be 100% sure, he did send us, at our request, material to which only Potti would have access.
We of course have lots more questions for Potti, and he said he hoped to be able to discuss the case further at some point. For now, he said, he has been advised to wait until malpractice lawsuits pending against him are resolved.
Posted by in anil potti retractions
Retraction Watch readers may recall that earlier this month, WordPress removed ten of our posts about Anil Potti — the former Duke oncology researcher who has retracted or corrected 19 papers — after a false DMCA copyright claim against us. The site which claimed the copyright violations — and which no longer exists — actually plagiarized our posts, not the other way around.
We’re still waiting for those posts to be reinstated; our understanding is that they’ll be back later this week. In the meantime, Nanopolitan, another site that wrote about Potti has been hit with what looks like a false DMCA claim.
Blogger, Nanopolitan’s host, has taken down one post. One of the owners of Nanopolitan, Abi, writes:
All I can say here is that the post has no copyright violation whatsoever — it had a bunch of links to stories and blog posts about Anil Potti…
Abi tells us that Blogger has yet to share the actual takedown notice with him.
We’ll update with anything we learn, and will of course let readers know when our posts reappear. You can read coverage of the case on various other blogs and news outlets.
Posted by in anil potti retractions
If you went looking for ten of our posts about Anil Potti today, you would have seen error messages instead. That’s because someone claiming to be from a news site in India alleged we violated their copyright with those ten posts about the former Duke University cancer researcher who has had 19 papers retracted, corrected, or partially retracted.
The truth of the matter, as is often the case, is exactly the opposite of the allegations. Here’s the email we received from Automattic — which owns WordPress, our blog host — earlier today:
We have received a DMCA Takedown Notice (http://chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi#QID130) for the following material published on your WordPress.com site:
5. http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/missouri-medical-board-reprimands-anil-potti/
7. http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/the-anil-potti-retraction-record-so-far/
As per the DMCA’s requirements, we have disabled public access to the material. If you do not have the legal rights to distribute the material, you are required to permanently delete the post and/or content and let us know when this has been done.
Republishing this material without permission of its copyright holder – or continuing to publish material that results in DMCA Takedown Notices – will result in a permanent suspension of your WordPress.com site and account. Publishing such material is a direct violation of the WordPress.com Terms of Service (http://wordpress.com/tos/), which you agreed to upon registration.
If you wish to formally challenge this notice, we will be happy to provide you will all of the appropriate details.
We of course requested the takedown notice, which WordPress provided shortly thereafter:
Email Address: narendrachatwal@newsbulet.in
Location of copyrighted work (where your original material is located): http://newsbulet.in/anil%20potti.html
http://newsbulet.in/north%20dakota.html
http://newsbulet.in/anil%20potti.html
http://newsbulet.in/Molecular%20Cancer.html
http://newsbulet.in/missouri%20medical.html
http://newsbulet.in/Coastal%20Cancer.html
http://newsbulet.in/retraction.html
http://newsbulet.in/clinical%20oncology.html
http://newsbulet.in/JCO.html
http://newsbulet.in/lawsuit.html
First Name: Narendra
Last Name: Chatwal
Company Name: News Bullet
Address Line 1: Plot No 15 & 16, Express Trade Tower
Address Line 2: Archana Complex
City: Noida
State/Region/Province: Utter Pradesh
Zip/Postal Code: 201302
Country: India
Telephone Number: 8953171759
Copyright holder you represent (if other than yourself):
Please describe the copyrighted work so that it may be easily identified: Hello WordPress Team,Myself Narendra Chatwal Senior editor in NewsBulet.In, a famous news firm in India. All the news we publish are individually researched by our reporters from all over India and then we publish them on our site and our news channel. Recently we found that some one had copied our material from the category Medical Reviews and published them on their site. So we request you to help us in protecting our content and copy right.
Thanks & Regards,
Narendra Chatwal
NewsBulet.In
Location (URL) of the unauthorized material on a WordPress.com site (NOT simply the primary URL of the site – example.wordpress.com; you must provide the full and exact permalink of the post, page, or image where the content appears, one per line) :[a list of the 10 Retraction Watch posts above]
If the infringement described above is represented by a third-party link to a downloadable file (e.g. http://rapidshare.com/files/…), please provide the URL of the file (one per line):
I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above as allegedly infringing is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.: Yes
I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.: Yes
Signed on this date of (today’s date, MM/DD/YYYY): 02/02/2013
Signature (your digital signature is legally binding): Narendra Chatwal
If you click on any of the NewsBulet.In URLs provided in the takedown notice, you will indeed find the text — and images — from ten of our posts about Anil Potti. But as will be abundantly clear to anyone who does so that our text was placed on NewsBulet.In, not the other way around.
In other words, NewsBulet.In is violating our copyright; we are not violating theirs. That’s driven home by the fact that the site did not exist until October 2012, according to a WhoIs search. All but one of the Retraction Watch posts they cite appeared before they even existed.
We have responded to Automattic with a counter-notice, and look forward to a speedy resolution of this situation, beginning with the Potti posts being reinstated.
Update, 10 p.m. Eastern, 2/5/13: Here’s Ars Technica’s coverage of this story.
Posted by in anil potti retractions
We’ve seen a lot of retraction notices for work by Anil Potti — 10, to be precise, along with 7 corrections and one partial retraction notice. As notices go, they tend to be pretty complete. So when we saw one in CHEST for this 2008 abstract, we were expecting something similar.
Instead, we were confused.
Here’s the notice:
We would like to withdraw our abstract “Upregulated Oncogenic Pathways in Patients Exposed to Tobacco Smoke May Provide a Novel Approach to Lung Cancer Chemoprevention,” which appeared in CHEST2 and was presented as a poster on October 29, 2008.
The results reported in this abstract and poster presentation were obtained using chemotherapeutic predictors developed in the Nature Medicine article, “Genomic Signatures to Guide the Use of Chemotherapeutics”1,that have since been shown to be inaccurate, and the article has been retracted.3
The authors relied on the results reported by Potti1, and they were not aware of the errors subsequently reported. We apologize for any negative impact on scientific research or clinical care caused by the presentation of our abstract.
1. Potti A, Dressman HK, Bild A et al. Genomic signatures to guide the use of chemotherapeutics. [retracted in: Nat Med. 2011;17(1):135] Nat Med. 2006;12(11):1294-1300.
2. Redman RC, Acharya CR, Anguiano A et al. Upregulated oncogenic pathways in patients exposed to tobacco smoke may provide a novel approach to lung cancer chemoprevention [abstract]. Chest. 2008;134(4):158001S.
3. Potti A, Dressman HK, Bild A et al. Retraction: Genomic signatures to guide the use of chemotherapeutics. Nat Med. 2011;17(1):135.
This was the sentence we found difficult to interpret:
The authors relied on the results reported by Potti1, and they were not aware of the errors subsequently reported.
That’s because “The authors” include Potti, so “they” would seem to include him too. How exactly was he not aware of the errors subsequently reported?
We’ve asked one of the authors, and the journal’s editor, who actually signed the notice, since the journal doesn’t indicate that, and also asked what that sentence meant. We’ll update with anything we learn.
Potti is now working at a cancer center in North Dakota, the state where he completed some of his medical training. On September 8, neighboring Minnesota granted him a medical license, as DukeCheck reported. He had allowed his previous Minnesota license to expire in 2008.
Anil Potti, the former Duke cancer researcher who has now retracted or corrected 18 papers amidst investigations into his work, is now working at a Grand Forks, North Dakota, cancer center.
The Grand Forks Herald reports that Potti has worked at the Cancer Center of North Dakota since May. His new boss, William Noyes, told the paper that
…Potti is a victim of unfair accusations and the negative news “is a dead issue.”
Potti resigned from Duke in late 2010, and joined the Coastal Cancer Center in South Carolina sometime last year. He left that post in February following a “60 Minutes” episode focused on questions about his work at Duke involving hundreds of patients in clinical trials. Although there had been scientific questions about Potti’s work for a few years, the story really began to unravel when The Cancer Letter reported that he had lied about having a Rhodes Scholarship on a grant application.
The oncologist has medical licenses in various states, two of which — Missouri and North Carolina — have reprimanded him. He has settled at least 11 cases of malpractice for$75,000 or more, as we reported in December.
Potti completed part of his training in North Dakota, which gave him a license to practice medicine on July 27, after he had been working on a provisional license since May, according to the Grand Forks Herald.
Posted by in anil potti retractions, oncology retractions, united states