ORI Finds Misconduct in Research by Former Yale Professor
The HHS Office of Research Integrity (ORI) concluded that a former assistant professor of medicine at Yale University engaged in research misconduct in research supported by U.S. Public Health Service funds. ORI found that Carlo Spirli, Ph.D., who had worked in Yale’s Department of Digestive Diseases, “engaged in research misconduct by knowingly, intentionally, or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating data” included in four published papers, two presentations and three grant applications. The data involved “falsified and/or fabricated Western blot image data for cholangiopathies in a murine model of Congenital Hepatic Fibrosis.” According to ORI, Spirli reused blot images, with or without manipulating them to conceal their similarities, and falsely relabeled them as data representing different experiments or proteins. Spirli falsified quantitative data in associated graphs purportedly derived from those images in 21 figures included in the papers, presentations and grant applications.
The papers in question all were published in the journal Hepatology between 2012 and 2015, while the presentations occurred at meetings of the European Association for the Study of the Liver in 2011 and the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases in 2012. Two of the grant applications were submitted in 2010, and one was submitted in 2018. All have been administratively withdrawn by the funding agency. Spirli has entered into a four-year voluntary exclusion agreement with government agencies and will request that three of the four papers be corrected or retracted.