Columbia, Penn State Cancer Researchers Face Retractions, One Blames LGBTQ Discrimination

By Joanna Insco of The College Fix

Expert raises concerns about academic integrity and risks to public health over flagged articles

Two prominent cancer researchers at Columbia and Pennsylvania State universities had their research articles retracted recently due to allegations of misconduct, including the use of manipulated data.

One, Deborah Kelly at Penn State, suggested prejudice against “LGBTQIA+” researchers could be to blame.

But a journalism scholar who reports on academic retractions told The College Fix that there are many reasons for the increasing number of retractions, including pressure from publishers to produce more work.

Sam Yoon, the chief of a cancer surgery division at Columbia University, had five research articles retracted and a sixth marked with an editor’s note for research conduct, The New York Times reported.

The retractions surrounded a 2010 study on the growth of tumors that was flagged for duplicate imaging. The images in research articles represent and reflect the data, so repeated imaging suggests unproofed results.

“With the latest retractions, the Columbia lab, led by Dr. Sam Yoon, has had more than a dozen studies pulled over suspicious results” this year, the New York Times reported. 

Ivan Oransky, who reports on the retraction of academic research papers, told The College Fix the issue in this case “was that nobody did anything about it.”

“That’s unfortunately typical in these cases. It’s a reputation hit for the university,” Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch, said.

Oransky said articles such as Yoon’s are used to inform clinical trials and decision-making, which means that research misconduct can put people directly in harm’s way.

“It’s important to correct the record whether you’re a newspaper reporter or a scientist,” he said.

He identified publisher pressure as a leading cause of research misconduct. Publishers push their researchers to produce high volumes of work in smaller time frames, leading to mistakes.

“This all trickles down to more doggy work, more fraud and so you’re seeing more retractions,” Oransky said.

Further, the recent influx in retraction may have more to do with an increase in investigations rather than simply an increase in misconduct.

“There has definitely been a growth in retraction,” Oransky said. “I think [the scientific community is] just finding more of it.”

He raised the question of whether stories like these could lead to science budget cuts. “Scientists really need to think about whether they lose trust when they cover things up … That could have a big impact on policy on budgets,” he said.

Similarly, articles by Penn State researcher Deborah Kelly were also recently flagged for unreliable data, Retraction Watch reported.

She lost a government-funded study and is facing the retraction of a paper after a review of her work identified “serious data integrity concerns,” according to emails obtained by Retraction Watch.

Like Yoon’s work, repeated figures and images were found within Kelly’s research, and electron microscopy maps that were included did not have the expected pixel sizes or features.

As a result, Penn State has banned Kelly, a biomedical engineering professor, “from conducting further research,” Inside Higher Ed reported.

When reached for comment, Kelly directed The College Fix to a November Substack post she wrote titled, “Deb Kelly: Setting the Record Straight,” in which she told her side of the story.

“I expect our work—and the people behind it—to be treated with respect and to be evaluated by the rules and established norms of the scientific process,” Kelly stated. 

She attributed her retractions to “thousands of harassing emails” which do “not meet that standard.” 

“Perhaps it is just an unfortunate coincidence that the harassers are male, and that many of my team identify as LGBTQIA+,” she stated. 

“I know that my work has authenticity, integrity, and impact, I will continue to defend it at every juncture,” she stated.

Further, Kelly said “constructive critiques” are an integral part of “peer review and scientific debate.” However, “the process only works if critique and debate is rigorous, respectful, and based in evidence,” she stated.

“Arguments need to be grounded in facts and data, not unsupported speculations and sketchy concoctions,” Kelly stated.

She also referenced the journal Nature, which reported over 10,000 research articles were retracted in 2023, “smashing annual records … as publishers struggle to clean up a slew of sham papers and peer-review fraud.”