It costs them a lot, but there’s one thing Duke University’s got, and that’s Homme Hellinga. A repeat fake-research offender, Hellinga should have been dumped long ago, but Duke’s still investigating claims made against him in 2004.
… Hellinga was the senior author of a celebrated Science paper in 2004, claiming his team had been the first to design and synthesize a novel enzyme, called novoTIM. It was a scientific first, but after an independent researcher was unable to replicate his results, Hellinga retracted it along with a follow-up paper in the Journal of Molecular Biology. Initially, he directed the blame at his student, lead author Mary Dwyer, who Duke investigated and cleared of research misconduct. Then, as his own behavior came under scrutiny from his critics, he publicly invited Duke to begin an investigation of his role in the disputed work.
Duke representatives said that the investigation is still ongoing. “It would be inappropriate for Duke to comment on any specific proceedings due to confidentiality and other restrictions,” Doug Stokke said.
Maybe Doug could comment – not specifically, but generally – on why it’s taking Duke five years and counting to check on a couple of scientific papers.
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UD thinks it’s simply because Duke loves its man. He isn’t true he beats me too what can I do? Oh my man I love him so…
And now things are even worse. Duke’s going to need another half decade before it gets back to us on Homme.
… Hellinga has [again] been under investigation for possible research misconduct, following the retraction of a Science paper on computational design of enzymes in February 2008. This week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hellinga’s former postdoc Birte Höcker and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Germany dispute the conclusions of his studies on ligand-binding proteins, which appeared in Nature in 2003 and PNAS in 2004…
October 24th, 2009 at 6:44PM
What happens to all the graduate students and post docs who work in this guys lab? Is the work they have done questioned as well?
Start pulling on those threads and everything comes apart.
Take home message….don’t pull on that.
October 25th, 2009 at 8:13AM
They are hoping that he will land another job and go quietly if they wait long enough?