Interesting, Non Political News

David Latchman, professor of genetics at University College London and master of Birkbeck, University of London – a post that earns him £380,000 a year – has angered senior academics by presiding over a laboratory that published fraudulent research, mostly on genetics and heart disease, for more than a decade. The number of fabricated results and the length of time over which the deception took place made the case one of the worst instances of research fraud uncovered in a British university.

Latchman blames junior lab staff for falsifying data, and two investigations at UCL, the first in 2015, found no evidence that he intended to commit, or was aware of, the fraud. A disciplinary hearing in 2018 concluded that there were insufficient grounds for dismissal or for any formal action against him.

But the investigations were deeply critical of Latchman. Both found that his failure to run the lab properly, and his position as author on many of the doctored papers, amounted to “recklessness”, and upheld an allegation of research misconduct against him. Before opening its formal investigations, UCL convened two screening panels to review 60 papers from Latchman’s lab dating back to 1997. Fraud had been alleged in all of them.

In one paper, six images had been flipped or copied and relabelled as new. In a statement retracting the study, one of the authors, Anastasis Stephanou, now at the European University in Cyprus, said he regretted the “inappropriate figure manipulations of which the co-authors were completely unaware”. Dr Stephanou did not respond to a request for comment. The second screening panel uncovered six more fraudulent papers. In one, an image of rat tissue appeared to be passed off as human. Another paper contained clear evidence of “cloning”, where parts of an image are copied and pasted.

One member of Hardy’s panel was Professor Gudrun Moore, a geneticist at UCL. She said: “The outcome of this has shown, at the very least, that he is a very poor leader of a scientific team, and under his leadership, paper after paper was published with incorrect data. “I was surprised that he did not resign. Things go wrong in science all the time but the facts and the data have to be sacred. If we are not telling our young researchers that, what are we telling them? That if you don’t get the outcome you want, you can just make it up?”

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