BETHESDA-A genetics student’s alleged fabrication could cost his Ph.D., but he may get an M.D.
The University of Michigan confirms that it is investigating a candidate in its M.D.-Ph.D. program who reportedly confessed to faking data in five published papers on the genetics of acute myelocytic leukemia.
It declined to name the student-identified elsewhere as Amitav Hajra-but said he was still enrolled and eligible for one or even both degrees.
Hajra is in the last year of his M.D. work and has finished the Ph.D. phase. His coauthor was Dr. Francis Collins, director of NIH’s National Center for Human Genome Research.
Dr. Collins has asked that all or part of the papers be retracted, including two in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He said he was “devastated” by the fraud, which emerged in August when a reviewer noted that a manuscript’s illustration had data that could not be authentic. Soon after, Dr. Collins sent a letter to geneticists and others with the bad news.
Dr. Collins, formerly at Michigan, said he thought the alleged research fraud might void the Ph.D. But a Michigan spokesman said the M.D. was “an open-ended question.” Hajra said he was waiting to hear.
The alleged fraud unraveled when the reviewer questioned whether a Western blot gel might have been faked. Dr. Collins said the student was confronted and confessed to that and other instances of fakery. The presumed fraud questions research that suggests a rearrangement on chromosome 16 is responsible for adult leukemia type M4. The fusion protein from the rearrangement is believed linked to the malignant transformation. -Joe R. Neel
BETHESDA-A genetics student’s alleged fabrication could cost his Ph.D., but he may get an M.D.
