Notice is hereby given that ORI and the Assistant Secretary for Health have taken final action in the following case:
Based on the findings of an inquiry conducted by Dartmouth College, an investigation conducted by another Federal agency, and additional analysis conducted by ORI during its oversight review, the U.S. PHS found that Juan Carlos Jorge-Rivera, Ph.D., former postdoctoral fellow, Department of Physiology, Dartmouth College, engaged in misconduct in science in research funded by grant R01 NS28668.
Specifically, Dr. Jorge-Rivera knowingly and intentionally falsified amplifier gain in at least 11 experiments of his postdoctoral research aimed at measuring the effects of anabolic steroids on GABAnergic current in brain cells and reported the falsified data in Figures 4 and 6 of the following paper: Jorge-Rivera, J.C., McIntyre, K.L., & Henderson, L.P. “Anabolic steroids induce region- and subunit-specific modulations of GABA receptor mediated currents in the rat forebrain.’ Journal of Neurophysiology 83:3299-3309, 2000.
PhysioProf said
The paper on the JNeurophys Web site is not (yet?) tagged as being retracted.
The kind of neurophysiology fakery that always amazes me in its brazen stupidity is to just rescale a control trace, and then present it as an experimental effect. There are numerous papers out there in the literature, many of which have never been retracted, in which this kind of chicanery is evident just by looking at the traces. You’d think these fraudsters would at least be smart enough to rescale a control trace other than one they include in the paper at the correct scale! The failure of reviewers to catch this kind of thing is pathetic.
I looked at the Jorge-Rivera paper and didn’t see anything like that. The figures that are asserted to contain the fraudulent data are just summary graphs without traces, so you can’t fault reviewers in this case for failing to catch it.
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