Retracted Papers Spur Million-Dollar Lawsuit.

The article reports that one of the authors of two plant biology papers that were retracted last year is suing the senior author who withdrew the papers. She is alleging that her former lab chief threatened to ruin her career and then did so with the retractions. In notices published almost a year ago, Daniel Klessig of the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research in Ithaca, New York, and several colleagues said they were retracting two papers, which described a new plant enzyme and had appeared in Cell and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, because they had been unable to reproduce certain results. The retraction notices, however, were not approved or signed by the first author on both papers, Meena Chandok. Chandok has now launched a legal counterattack. In late August, she filed a civil lawsuit in a U.S. district court in Syracuse, New York, seeking more than $1 million in punitive and compensatory damages from Klessig. Among other claims in her lawsuit, Chandok alleges that after she resigned from the lab in March 2004, Klessig threatened to press misconduct charges and withhold support for her visa-extension application if she didn't help him with further research on the enzyme.