Courtesy Nature Publishing Group
A biologist at University College London (UCL) has resigned his post and taken responsibility for “inappropriate figures manipulations” in three now-retracted papers.
Assegid Garedew, formerly a senior research investigator in Salvador Moncada‘s group, stepped down earlier this summer in the midst of an investigation that should be completed soon, Moncada tells Retraction Watch.
The three retraction notices for papers by Garedew and colleagues are all similar.
From Cell Metabolism: “Mitochondrial Dynamics, Biogenesis, and Function Are Coordinated with the Cell Cycle by APC/CCDH1“, cited once, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge:
This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy).This article has been retracted at the request of the Authors.We have recently identified errors affecting several figure panels in Figures 4, 5, and S4, in which control data were processed inappropriately such that the figure panels do not accurately report the original data. While the conclusions reached in this paper may be sound, given the circumstances, the most responsible course of action is to retract the paper. A.G. regrets the inappropriate figure manipulations, of which his coauthors were completely unaware. We sincerely apologize to the scientific community for any confusion or adverse consequences resulting from the publication of these data.
From the Journal of Cell Science: “Mitochondrial dysfunction and HIF1α stabilization in inflammation,” a paper cited eight times:
The authors wish to retract the above paper. We have recently identified errors affecting certain figure panels in Fig. 5 in which control data were processed inappropriately such that the figure panels do not accurately report the original data. The misuse and re-use of western blot bands violates the editorial policy of Journal of Cell Science, and so we must retract this article. A. G. regrets the inappropriate figure manipulations, of which his co-author was completely unaware.
We sincerely apologize to the scientific community for any confusion or adverse consequences resulting from the publication of these data.
From Cell Death and Diffrentiation: “Activated macrophages utilize glycolytic ATP to maintain mitochondrial membrane potential and prevent apoptotic cell death,” cited 17 times:
The authors wish to retract the above paper. We have recently identified errors affecting certain panels in Figure 6, in which data were processed in such a way that the figure panels do not reflect the original data. AG regrets the inappropriate figure manipulations, of which his co-authors were completely unaware. Although we believe that the conclusions reached in this paper are essentially sound, we feel that the most responsible course of action is to retract the paper. We sincerely apologize to the scientific community for any confusion or adverse consequences resulting from the publication of these data.
Moncada tells us:
There has been an investigation at UCL which is about to be completed. It indicates that the person solely responsible for the fraud leading to the retraction of the three papers is Dr Garedew. He has admitted this and resigned as a senior research investigator in my group on the 19th June. We do not expect to retract any other paper from this laboratory since Dr Garedew was not involved in any of the other research projects.