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Investigators at the National Institutes of Health have concluded that
a co-author of Nobel laureate David Baltimore fabricated entire sets of
data from 1986 to 1988 to support a paper published in the journal Cell
in 1986. Baltimore, who earlier attacked a Congressional investigation into
the affair as a threat to scientific freedom, has now asked Cell to retract
the paper.

The finding by the NIH’s Office of Scientific Integrity may bring to
a close Washington’s longest-running soap opera of science. At the centre
of the drama are Thereza Imanishi-Kiri, the primary author of the paper,
and Margot O’Toole, a researcher who first raised questions about its conclusions.
O’Toole lost her job in Imanishi-Kiri’s laboratory as a result.

Congressman John Dingell, who is investigating misconduct among scientists,
took up O’Toole’s cause. Baltimore, who is named as an author of the paper
in Cell because much of the work was done in his laboratory, came to Imanishi-Kiri’s
defence. In a letter to colleagues, he called Dingell’s inquiry ‘a harbinger
of threats to scientific communication and scientific freedom’.

The NIH’s investigators worked closely with O’Toole while reviewing
data from Imanishi-Kiri’s experiments. They also analysed paper, ink, and
type fonts from laboratory printers which produced the data found in Imanishi-Kiri’s
notebooks. They found that some of the data could not have been produced
in 1985, when Imanishi-Kiri said it was, because that type of ink was not
used in her laboratory at that time.

The NIH’s investigation did not resolve the question of whether simple
error, mistakes, or fraud led to the original publication of conclusions
unsupported by experimental data. But once O’Toole and outside investigators
began to ask questions about the paper, Imanishi-Kiri began systematically
fabricating data to support it, according to the NIH report. Some of these
falsified data were published in Cell in 1988 as corrections to the original
paper.

Although there is no evidence that Baltimore knew of the fabricated
data, the NIH investigators found some of his statements ‘extraordinary’
and ‘deeply troubling’. In an interview with investigators, Baltimore said:
‘You can make up anything that you want in your notebooks, but you can’t
call it fraud unless it’s published. You . . . sort of tricked Thereza into
publishing a few numbers and now you’re going to go back and see if you
can produce these as fraud.’

According to the NIH report, Baltimore could have used his ‘seniority
and standing’ to resolve questions about the paper published in Cell early
on in the controversy, before Imanishi-Kiri began wholesale fabrication
of data.