The University of Kentucky distinguishes itself not merely in football and basketball. The federal Office of Research Integrity has singled out one of its highest-profile professors for a decade of research fraud.

Eric J. Smart, a former UK professor of pediatrics and physiology, pediatrics vice chair of research and the Barnstable-Brown chair in diabetes research … falsified data that was included in at least 10 published papers and numerous reports and applications.

… Among the falsified data … were five grant applications and three progress reports about nonexistent “knockout” mice, which have been genetically engineered to have at least one gene turned off, or “knocked out,” through a targeted mutation.

The ORI found many of Smart’s published findings to be falsified also. In more than 33 instances the office found Smart to be guilty of manipulating “western blots” — an analytic technique that allows scientists to find a specific protein in a sample of tissue — to falsify data in publications and reports in order to complete his research.

Vice chair of research! As with their coaches, UK really knows how to pick ’em.

Smart’s now teaching high school at the wonderfully named Bourbon High; but the county superintendent says Smart has assured her “there is no evidence to base their (the ORI’s) allegations on.” Whew! You wouldn’t want someone who’s been systematically lying about the results of medical research for over ten years teaching your kids.

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By the way, Scathing Online Schoolmarm will point out that the article about Smart in UK’s paper says his research has now been “censored.” I think they mean “censured.”

… hide nor tuft of Keith Ablow, the faculty member who said that the only responsible thing he as a physician could recommend to Vice President Joe Biden’s family would be extensive tests for dementia and alcoholism.

Long before his post-debate analysis, Ablow had drawn protests from Tufts students and staff; but he remains that curious non-thing, an assistant clinical professor.

Ablow blows up frequently in public places with strange and strictly non-empirical remarks about other people, and, each time he does, Tufts notes that Ablow is non-faculty faculty – gets no money, has done nothing on campus for years.

Tufts calls Ablow’s position “voluntary,” but UD wonders what this means. He gets to just, like, be on the university’s faculty, because he wants to? Can any MD who thinks Soviet-style forensics is a blast voluntarily attach himself to Tufts? Is the position voluntary for Ablow and involuntary for Tufts?

Let’s say, for instance, that Tufts would like to stop enjoying its affiliation with Keith Ablow. Let’s say Tufts doesn’t think it’s right for Ablow to enjoy the respectability an academic affiliation confers. Let’s go overboard and even say that psychiatrists on the psychiatry faculty at Tufts conclude Ablow’s non-empirical procedure runs counter to everything psychiatry as a respectable therapeutic and intellectual endeavor has tried to be. Can’t it do anything about that?

A Japanese fraudster managed to convince that country’s largest newspaper that he’d injected reprogrammed stem cells into people with diseased hearts and dramatically improved their functioning.

In a poster presented at a meeting of the New York Stem Cell Foundation, [Hisashi] Moriguchi – who claimed to work at Harvard Medical School and the University of Tokyo – described results from a trial in which cardiac muscle cells were grown from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, and transplanted into six US patients with severe heart failure.

The embarrassed newspaper has issued an apology.

Now that all the legitimate scientists have left the state of Texas’ Cancer Prevention and Research Institute, the state can breathe a sigh of relief. Three billion dollars for funding distribution is a lot of money, and the cronies and profiteers will be able to get at it much more easily. All the powerful people who care more about peer review than money have left in disgust.

Gilman’s resignation [he was chief scientist] followed a decision by the institute’s oversight committee to set aside scientific grant proposals and rush approval of an $18 million commercialization grant led by the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Ah, M.D. Anderson, domain of fuck-conflict-of-interest Ronald Pinho!

Since his arrest in Italy, [Mark] Weinberger, [a plastic surgeon found guilty of fraud,] has been locked up at the city’s federal Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he claimed to cook meals for inmates and teach yoga classes, according to the Chicago Tribune. In addition, Weinberger conducted a class on non-violence in which he “personally scripts Socractic dialogues taking place between various historical figures,” the paper reported.

In the local paper, a geology professor defends his work.

I must respond to the recent letter to the editor by Ms. Meredith Berg strongly critical of my upcoming talk at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls on St. Croix Valley geology. … Ms. Berg is correct that I will not be spending time on a young-earth or Biblical flood model for the St. Croix Valley. In my 50 years of studying and doing geology here and around the world I have not seen a shred of geological evidence for this, and it would do my audience a disservice to spend time on it.

With his NIH colleague, Tibor Borsos, he wrote a book about complement.

Now immunologists at Cardiff University who study complement are under investigation for research fraud. Image manipulation, among other things.

UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior‘s got all sorts of shit going down lately.

There’s Bystritsky, who’s front and center in the Phyllis Harvey lawsuit against that university.

And there’s Strober, a Ghost of Glaxo Past… (see post just under this one)…

On their main page, Semel invites you to PARTICIPATE IN OUR RESEARCH, but I get the feeling it’s not such a good idea.

… your university hospital is the most treacherous part of campus. There’s lots of money at stake, so corruption is highly likely. Conflict of interest among your professors may be rampant. There’s always someone on the staff stealing oxycontin to sell it. Some of your anesthesiologists are addicts.

Cowboys on the surgery team try this and that without bothering with the institutional review board. Since you don’t really pay attention to the doctors you allow to affiliate, some of them will turn out to run pill mills or, like UCLA’s Arnold Klein, will embarrass you in other ways.

You try to make the hospital a big profit center, but that almost never works. Meanwhile, as in this story from the University Medical Center Göttingen, some of your surgeons are managing to make it work quite nicely on a personal basis.

A surgeon identified as Dr. Aiman O. is suspected of fraudulently manipulating dozens of his patients’ test results, making them appear sicker than they were to get them liver transplants more quickly — and possibly putting them ahead of people who more desperately needed them. The case first emerged in late July at the University Medical Center Göttingen, in the northern German state of Lower Saxony, from where the senior physician has been suspended since November for allegedly tampering with some 23 transplant cases. A gastroenterologist suspected of involvement has also been suspended.

There’s huge money in this. Truly rich, truly desperate people will pay amazing sums for an organ, and all you have to do is shove aside other sick people who’ve been following the rules and waiting.

Whether it’s Joe Paterno at Penn State or Dr. J. Paul Muizelaar at University of California Davis, you really want to keep an eye on your overpaid and overlaureled personnel. Eventually the money and adulation will do to them what it does to pretty much everyone. It will make them believe their own publicity, and it will make them consider themselves free to do what they like, immune from consequences.

Immunity is Muizelaar’s medical speciality; he’s a research surgeon who tries to activate patients’ immune systems to fight cancers. Together with another faculty member, he’s been intrigued by the possibility that introducing bacteria into the heads of people with late-stage brain cancer might activate their immune system and in the process attack the disease.

Well and good; but these guys seem not to have felt the need to get institutional approval for this human experimentation. Of course, no problem getting the patients’ approval; they’re desperate. But precisely because people are desperate and therefore susceptible to dangerous and unproven procedures, you’ve got things like institutional review boards and all.

The guys are now banned from human research. Davis risks losing its federal research funding altogether.

La Vie en Dose.

The author of a new book about growing is interviewed.

[G]etting a mental-health diagnosis can intersect with the adolescent search for self. Being diagnosed and using medication confers an identity, that of someone with a mental disorder. To an adolescent who is preoccupied with constructing an identity anyway, and looking for clues to who she is, that can be a big deal. Some adolescents feel that having a diagnostic label is clarifying and that it helps them. But others wrestle with it. They ruminate about what it means to be sick. They take that identity deep inside, and sometimes magnify it way out of proportion. A diagnosis event can have lasting, rippling consequences, and I think adults should be very cautious and careful before they impose a diagnostic label, or let a young person self-impose such a label, on what may be ordinary developmental struggles.

But hey. That’s nothing. Because of the work of Joseph Biederman and others, it’s now routine for American toddlers to be given powerful psychotropics.

What? You mean thousands of people aren’t attracted to meetings featuring Charles Nemeroff and Alan Schatzberg?

Allen Frances goes on to say that “Psychiatric diagnosis has become too important to be left in the hands of a small, withering, cash-strapped, incompetent association that feels compelled to regard its bottom line as a higher priority than having a safe, scientifically sound, and widely accepted diagnostic system.”

Look at the Pope over there in Vatican City taking a star turn in What the Butler Saw as his city state fails to “shed its reputation as a scandal plagued tax haven.”

Look at the big happy family of University of Texas scientists who just went ahead and gave the family a huge state grant, without bothering to check with the provost or anything.

And look at another huge bureaucracy, the place UD‘s father spent his entire scientific career: the National Institutes of Health. The NIH just went ahead and gave America’s own tête d’affiche pour conflit d’intérêts (Charles Nemeroff has been called poster boy for conflict of interest so many times, I thought I’d jazz it up by putting it in French) another big grant, since you want to encourage his sort of behavior… or whatever…

I mean, it’s about bureaucracies, isn’t it? In all three cases? You’ve got cronies and histories of you do me and I do you and all… Everybody’s in everybody else’s pocket…

But eventually, as in all three of these cases, things get so brazen that the media notices; and then, if the money involved comes from taxpayers, politicians get all het up about it. As in this what the fuck? letter from Senator Charles Grassley to NIH. Grassley sends a copy to the notorious Donna Shalala.

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More coverage of the nettlesome Nemeroff.

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The latest University of Miami scandal jumps to the Miami Herald. Shalala and Nemeroff are trying out the no comment option, but I don’t think it’s going to work.

… Andrew Scull titles his latest essay in the Times Literary Supplement. It looks to be a good summary of the ongoing scandal of the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but you and I can’t read it without a subscription. Here’s an excerpt (from a post about it in Commonweal):

As diagnostic criteria were loosened [in DSM III], an extraordinary expansion of the numbers of mentally sick individuals ensued. This has been particular evident among, but by no means confined to, the ranks of the young. “Juvenile biopolar disorder”, for example, increased forty-fold in just a decade, between 1994 and 2004. An autism epidemic broke out, as a formerly rare condition, seen in less than one in 500 children at the outset of the same decade, was found among one in every ninety children only ten years later. The story for hyperactivity, subsequently relabelled ADHD, is similar, with 10 per cent of male American children now taking pills daily for their “disease”. Among adults, one in every seventy-six Americans qualified for welfare payments based on mental disability by 2007.

If psychiatrists’ inability to agree among themselves on a diagnosis threatened to make them a laughing stock in the 1970s, the relabelling of a host of ordinary life events as psychiatric pathology now seems to promise more of the same. Social anxiety disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, school phobia, narcissistic and borderline personality disorders are apparently now to be joined by such things as pathological gambling, binge eating disorder, hypersexuality disorder, temper dysregulation disorder, mixed anxiety depressive disorder, minor neurocognitive disorder, and attenuated psychotic symptoms syndrome.

Yet we are almost as far removed as ever from understanding the etiological roots of major psychiatric disorders, let alone these more controversial diagnoses (which many people would argue do not belong in the medical arena in the first place). That these diagnoses provide lucrative new markets for psychopharmacology’s products raises questions in many minds about whether commercial concerns are illegitimately driving the expansion of the psychiatric universe – a concern that is scarcely allayed when one recalls that the great majority of the members of the DSM task force are recipients of drug company largesse.

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New pathologies are breaking out all the time.

There’s a whole other category for Kim Kardashian.

(UD thanks David.)