More Doubts Raised on Fired MIT Professor
Marcella Bombardieri and Gareth Cook
Boston Globe
__________
Cambridge, Massachusetts (US):
Luk Van Parijs, the MIT professor fired this week for research fraud, may have fabricated data in two journal articles he coauthored in the late 1990s, a former colleague said, suggesting that he may have been falsifying work for as long as eight years in some of the nation's top biological laboratories.
The two papers that came to light yesterday were written while Van Parijs worked as a graduate student at Brigham and Women's Hospital, studying the immune system. The new papers -- combined with one determined to be fraudulent by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and two others being investigated by the California Institute of Technology, where he worked from 1998 to 2000 -- expand the scope of questions that now surround Van Parijs, 35. He was dismissed Wednesday after MIT said he admitted to fabricating and falsifying data in a paper, as well as in unpublished manuscripts and grant applications.
The new revelation deepens the mystery about a rising star who was popular with students and colleagues and appeared to be a gifted biologist. In both of the new cases, it appears that Van Parijs said he had done work that he had not done, work that would have been a small part of the overall experiment.
In one case, the data in question would not have affected the conclusion, said Dr. Abul Abbas, who directed the Brigham laboratory where Van Parijs worked and was the senior author on both papers. For the second paper, the questionable data may have affected the outcome, Abbas said.
Oct 30, 2005
Marcella Bombardieri and Gareth Cook
Boston Globe
__________
Cambridge, Massachusetts (US):
Luk Van Parijs, the MIT professor fired this week for research fraud, may have fabricated data in two journal articles he coauthored in the late 1990s, a former colleague said, suggesting that he may have been falsifying work for as long as eight years in some of the nation's top biological laboratories.
The two papers that came to light yesterday were written while Van Parijs worked as a graduate student at Brigham and Women's Hospital, studying the immune system. The new papers -- combined with one determined to be fraudulent by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and two others being investigated by the California Institute of Technology, where he worked from 1998 to 2000 -- expand the scope of questions that now surround Van Parijs, 35. He was dismissed Wednesday after MIT said he admitted to fabricating and falsifying data in a paper, as well as in unpublished manuscripts and grant applications.
The new revelation deepens the mystery about a rising star who was popular with students and colleagues and appeared to be a gifted biologist. In both of the new cases, it appears that Van Parijs said he had done work that he had not done, work that would have been a small part of the overall experiment.
In one case, the data in question would not have affected the conclusion, said Dr. Abul Abbas, who directed the Brigham laboratory where Van Parijs worked and was the senior author on both papers. For the second paper, the questionable data may have affected the outcome, Abbas said.
Oct 30, 2005
