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The National Institutes of Health said Thursday that Dr. Eliezer Masliah, a prominent Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease researcher, falsified or fabricated images published in two papers, which it is now retracting.
Masliah spent decades at the University of California, San Diego, and served as a senior leader of the National Institute on Aging since 2016. NIH said that Masliah had been removed from his leadership position and declined to comment further.
The NIH investigation of Masliah began December and concluded earlier this month. But the agency did not make any public comments until the journal Science published its own lengthy investigation earlier in the day Thursday.
Science’s findings show that scores of Masliah’s roughly 800 research papers published while he was at UC San Diego and NIA are riddled with what seem to be falsified images of proteins and brain tissue. Some of them, the investigation shows, have been reused across papers published years apart to document entirely different experiments.
Science presented initial concerns about Masliah’s work to forensic analysts who specialized in scientific research. The analysts then produced a 300-page dossier that documented “a steady stream” of suspect images in over 100 studies published between 1997 and 2023.
“In our opinion, this pattern of anomalous data raises a credible concern for research misconduct and calls into question a remarkably large body of scientific work,” the analysts told Science.
NIH was given a copy of the dossier more than two weeks before the investigation was published but didn’t comment until after. Masliah has not rejected or challenged any of the dossier’s findings so far.
Although the creators of the dossier say they are not necessarily accusing Masliah or his colleagues of fraud or misconduct and note that some of the image problems may be simple errors in the publication process, Science contacted nearly a dozen neuroscientists who were stunned by the results and said most of the suspect work cannot reasonably be explained as careless errors.
“Breathtaking,” said neuroscientist Christian Haass of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. “People will, of course, be shocked, as I was … I was falling from a chair, basically.”
