Summary of Case

Overly Ambitious Researchers
For the past few years, several scientific organizations have been trying to come up with a definition for scientific misconduct. All of the organizations agree that it has something to do with fabrication of data. Scientific misconduct makes us wonder what reports are true. The consequences for misconduct can be lengthy and serious and have a chain reaction of these consequences. These cases of fabrication aren’t always easy to detect. John Darsee was a Research Fellow in the Cardiac Research Laboratory and had a special area of research concerning the testing of heart drugs on dogs.
In May of 1981, three colleagues observed his labeling of the data recordings and the recordings were not nearly realistic. Darsee admitted to fabrication and suffered the consequences. His research fellowship was terminated and his faculty position was withdrawn.
In October, Darsee was caught forging data; this time, the data showed no variation. It looked “too good”. As a result, he lost his researcher position at Harvard, and lost all NIH funding.
Next, there was the Bruening case. Bruening was fabricating data for an experiment dealing with the effects of psychotropic medication for mentally retarded patients. Dr. Alan Poling, one of the psychologists involved in the investigation, pointed out that Bruening was a contributor of 34% of all published research on the treatment of mentally retarded people. The validity of the entire research project is now questioned because of Bruening’s fabricated data.