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Fraud Rounds: Bone Researcher Blamed Assistant for Her Fakery

— A Toronto researcher earns a lifetime ban from Federal funding.

Last Updated August 10, 2016
MedpageToday

Welcome to Fraud Rounds, a regular look at what happens when clinical research goes wrong. For background, see this post.

In February 2011, JAMA published a that seemed cautiously optimistic: Postmenopausal women with the condition, according the the findings, might benefit somewhat from nitroglycerin ointment. But a little less than 5 years later, the journal retracted the paper, saying that a university investigation had found that Sophie Jamal, MD, PhD, had "."

Last week, the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), which had partially funded the work, announced Jamal had been . It turns out that not only had Jamal manipulated her data, she had "falsely accused a research assistant of having carried out the manipulations." Jamal will also have to pay back the costs of her grants.

Jamal's timing was unfortunate, at least for her: She became the first researcher found to have committed fraud whom the CIHR decided to name. Until the announcement, the agency had cited confidentiality rules and issued only anonymized reports.

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