The Notice and Its Findings
Image duplication has cost a Harvard-affiliated research group a paper. The joint inquiry, run by Brigham and Women’s Hospital together with Harvard Medical School, ended with the authors themselves asking the Journal of Experimental Medicine to pull their September 2019 article, which explored therapy for tumors arising from tuberous sclerosis complex, a genetic condition. Twelve names appear on the publication, a number of them tied to Brigham and Women’s Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine division.
Heading the author list as corresponding author is David Kwiatkowski, whose appointments span oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s, plus a Harvard Medical School professorship. Money for the work included two U.S. Department of Defense grants and an NIH award made to Kwiatkowski personally.
June 12 is the date on the retraction notice, which states the authors requested it after the joint review wrapped. Four images, the notice says, “have been found unreliable due to image duplication,” and one figure’s data “do not accurately represent the source data.” Their own conclusion leaves no room: “The authors have lost confidence in the data and believe the most responsible course of action is to retract the article,” the notice records.
Other Flagged Work on PubPeer
Records suggest the problem may reach wider. Citations of the now-retracted study stand at 21 in Clarivate’s Web of Science, and the Retraction Watch database shows no prior retraction for anyone on the paper. Seven further publications carrying Kwiatkowski’s name have drawn PubPeer comment threads. One, from February, says a 2014 PLOS One paper’s images look “much more similar than expected.”
History adds weight. Commenters in 2020 spotted lookalike images spread over three figures of a 2002 study counting Kwiatkowski among its coauthors. A 2021 correction explained that experiments behind two of those images had been rerun, because the 18-year-old data were no longer accessible, yet a PubPeer reply noted the third figure was still unaccounted for, arguing the correction “does not address the very similar images” there.
Quiet Institutions, Named Colleagues
Harvard Medical School’s dean for faculty and research integrity, Kristin Bittinger, kept specifics to herself: “Any concerns brought to our attention are reviewed thoroughly in accordance with our institutional policies and applicable regulations,” she said. Rockefeller University Press, which publishes the journal, confirmed through communications staffer Rory Williams that the authors had flagged the institutional probe to it, while policy kept him from detailing anything further. Kwiatkowski himself passed on questions about the retraction and about whether further papers of his are being examined.
Elizabeth Henske, who leads the LAM Research and Clinical Care Center at Brigham and Women’s and codirects its Pulmonary Genetics Center, and John Asara, who runs the mass spectrometry core at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, are coauthors who likewise did not reply. PubPeer users have also remarked on image similarity in a separate 2014 Journal of Experimental Medicine paper from Kwiatkowski and Henske, and the publisher left unanswered the question of whether that one is under review.
Working sideways through the ecosystem, the machinery did its job here: an inquiry ran, the authors pulled the work, and the literature got cleaner. The broader backdrop is the 2024 Dana-Farber episode, in which a blogger’s duplication allegations led to seven study retractions. Nothing among the flagged publications alters how tuber sclerosis complex patients are treated right now, and patients with questions should raise them with their own physicians.
Sources
- Harvard cancer researchers earn retraction for image duplication – Retraction Watch
- Cancer research institute retracts studies amid controversy over errors
