Cleaning Up the Paper Trail.

The article reports that immunologist Luk van Parijs was fired from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The school alleged that he had confessed to faking data in one published paper, several unpublished manuscripts and grant applications. Van Parijs's academic future may be shot to pieces. But his scientific past, so far is intact. He has contributed to roughly 40 papers stretching back to 1994, many of them in the blossoming field of RNA interference. None has been publicly labeled fraudulent or retracted. MIT has not said which paper it found to be problematic. Other investigations are continuing. One of the biggest problems in these fraud things says Kathleen Case, publisher at the American Association for Cancer Research in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is that the investigations get finished. And the last thing people think of is the journals. Large-scale fraud cases are rare. But scientists whose work is challenged have often co-authored dozens or even hundreds of papers.