Retraction Watch

How the Karolinska protected Paolo Macchiarini — and whistleblowers paid the price

Carl Elliott

Retraction Watch readers may recall the story of Paolo Macchiarini, about whom we first wrote in 2012 before he became the subject of international scrutiny — and who has now been sentenced to prison. We are pleased to present an excerpt about the Macchiarini case from The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No by Carl Elliott published by W. W. Norton, May 2024.

One incident illustrates just how determined the leaders of the Karolinska Institute were to protect Paolo Macchiarini. In November of 2014, a leaked copy of the whistleblowers’ report came into the hands of the New York Times, which published an article titled “Leading Surgeon Is Accused of Misconduct in Experimental Transplant Operations.” The article detailed several of the most serious allegations against Macchiarini: that he had never obtained ethical permission to conduct his experiments, that his 2011 study in The Lancet had misrepresented the outcome of Beyene’s implant, and that of the three patients at the Karolinska Institute that Macchiarini had given synthetic implants, only Beyene had signed a consent form— and the form was dated two weeks after his surgery. The publicity generated by the article all but forced the Karolinska Institute to act. Anders Hamsten, the vice-chancellor, said he would ask for an external inquiry.

Retaliation against the whistleblowers came quickly. According to Simonson, the whistleblowers were told that they had violated patient privacy and would be fired immediately. That didn’t happen, but in December the Karolinska Institute informed the whistleblowers that the head of the cardiothoracic clinic would deliver a formal warning, the last step before an employee is terminated.

The Karolinska Institute also reported the whistleblowers to the police. “I was called down to the police and put in a room with no windows, with a tape recorder and a lawyer and a policeman in front of me, and interrogated. That was pretty scary,” Matthias Corbascio, a cardiothoracic surgeons says. “It was exactly what it’s like on television. And you know, it’s hard to be a tough guy in that room.”

Lack of permits, ‘selective’ data halt research at Swedish prosthetics research center

In the late afternoon at a conference in Cartagena last year, a team of Swedish researchers presented their work on a technique that uses machine learning to translate the body’s own electric signals used to move a limb. They had tested it on a minor recovering from a stroke.

Documents from an internal investigation shared by Chalmers University have now revealed, however, that this case study was part of a series of regulatory lapses and suspicious research practices at the Centre for Bionics and Pain Research (CBPR) where the clinical research was conducted. The researchers seem to have conducted the study before Max Ortiz-Catalán, the center’s founder and former manager, had secured regulatory approval from the relevant Swedish agency.

Chalmers, the Centre’s home, has now suspended it after also suspecting that its data and research participants seemed “systematically selected” so that treatments appeared effective, and excluded data when treatments caused health problems. The investigation also uncovered the center had no person responsible for compliance, which is a requirement under Swedish law, and that personal data had been handled poorly.

Norway university committee recommends probe into the country’s most productive researcher

Filippo Berto, by ONOLO – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

In 2019, Filippo Berto was hailed as Norway’s most productive researcher, publishing a new study on average every two to three days.

Five years on, a committee appointed by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), where Berto, a mechanical engineer, was based until last year, is recommending that the institution carries out an in-depth investigation into his work following a complaint by Per Steineide Refseth, a librarian at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences in Rena.

Rune Nydal, a philosopher at NTNU who leads the independent research integrity committee that met May 14 partly to discuss the complaint about Berto’s work, told Retraction Watch it is recommending NTNU’s rector conduct an in-depth probe into Berto’s papers and release a public statement on the outcome.

Nature earns ire over lack of code availability for Google DeepMind protein folding paper

A group of researchers is taking Nature to task for publishing a paper earlier this month about Google DeepMind’s protein folding prediction program without requiring the authors publish the code behind the work.

Roland Dunbrack, of Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, peer-reviewed the paper but was “not given access to code during the review,” the authors of a letter submitted today, May 14, to Nature – including Dunbrack – write, “despite repeated requests.”

A Nature podcast said AlphaFold3 – unlike AlphaFold2 – “can accurately predict protein-molecule complexes containing DNA, RNA and more. Although the new version is restricted to non-commercial use, researchers are excited by its greater range of predictive abilities and the prospect of speedier drug discovery.”

Professor, former dean earns nearly 100 expressions of concern for citation manipulation

A professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia who once served as a dean at the Stevens Institute of Technology in the United States, has received expressions of concern on 93 of his conference proceedings for what a publisher said were irrelevant self-citations and “artificially inflating the number of citations.”

The notes by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) on the work of Yehia Massoud, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, take two forms. One reads:

Publisher slaps 60 papers in chemistry journal with expressions of concern

An Elsevier chemistry journal has marked more than 60 papers with expressions of concern amid an investigation involving potential undisclosed conflicts of interest among editors, authorship irregularities and manipulation of peer reviews and citations.

One of the notices, published online April 11 in Chemosphere, reads, for example:

Weekend reads: Editor under scrutiny resigns; bullshitting scientists; questionable practices in expanding disciplines

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 48,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 250 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Journal pulls paper by economist who failed to disclose data tinkering

An Elsevier journal last week retracted a paper by two senior economists who used questionable methods to replace large chunks of missing observations in their dataset without disclosing the procedure.

The move follows a Retraction Watch story published in February that revealed the paper’s corresponding author, Almas Heshmati of Jönköping University in Sweden, used Excel’s autofill function and other undisclosed operations to populate thousands of empty cells, or well over 10% of the dataset.

In a guest post on our blog, economist Gary Smith argued Heshmati and his coauthor had “no justification” for not describing what they had done. Smith also commented in an article for Mind Matters that “the solution to an absence of data is not to fabricate data.”

Less than three weeks after our report, Elsevier told us it would pull the study, “Green innovations and patents in OECD countries,” which appeared last year in the Journal of Cleaner Production. On May 4, the publisher issued a retraction notice stating:

Concussion researcher McCrory up to 17 retractions

More than two years after retracting an article by one of its former editors in chief for plagiarism, the British Journal of Sports Medicine has retracted six more pieces by the editor, Paul McCrory, a noted concussion researcher in Australia.

The retractions join 11 more of McCrory’s works, including 10 from BJSM and one from Current Sports Medicine Reports.The BJSM, published by The BMJ, is also correcting two additional articles by McCrory.

Troubles for McCrory – for decades “the world’s foremost doctor shaping the concussion protocols that are used by sports leagues and organizations globally,” according to the New York Times – began in 2021 when Steve Haake, a professor at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, told the BJSM McCrory had plagiarized a 2000 article by Haake in Physics World. (It would not be the only time the work was plagiarized.)

Give or take a year or two: Case reveals publishers’ vastly different retraction times

On March 1, 2022, Eric Ross, then a psychiatrist-in-training in Boston, alerted two major publishers to a pair of disturbingly similar papers he suspected had been “fabricated.”

“The articles are written by the same corresponding author and contain much of the same unrealistic data,” Ross, now an assistant professor at the University of Vermont, in Burlington, wrote in an email whose recipients included the editors-in-chief of Wiley’s CNS Neuroscience & Therapeutics and Springer Nature’s Neurotherapeutics.

Ross listed several “red flags” he felt clearly pointed to “research misconduct” in the two papers, which reported on two separate clinical trials of new antidepressant add-on medications (metformin and cilostazol). He also emphasized that fake medical research could have real consequences:

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