Opinion ID: 182691
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Allegedly Defamatory Statements by Klessig

Text: In early August, Klessig discussed Chandok's possible scientific misconduct with BTI's president, David Stern, who began an inquiry. On August 20, Klessig, Stern, Pola, and Martin, one of the coauthors of the PNAS article, met to discuss the Chandok matter. Stern decided to appoint an investigative committee, in accordance with BTI's policy on scientific misconduct, and to consider whether and when to retract the Cell and PNAS papers. It was decided that Klessig would notify NIH and the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the investigation and that Stern would notify the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Research Integrity (ORI). Because some of Chandok's research had been funded by a federal grant, and her findings were the basis of a subsequent federal grant application, Stern sent ORI a letter dated August 30, 2004, that began as follows: As required by 42 C.F.R. § 50.103(d),. . . I report the result of an inquiry into possible scientific misconduct on the part of a postdoctoral fellow formerly employed by BTI. The research in question was funded in part by the N.I.H. . . . and some of the data in question were furnished as part of a grant proposal which resulted in the above-mentioned award. My determination is that there is sufficient evidence to proceed with an investigation. . . . The letter proceeded to summarize that evidence, which included Stern's interviews with BTI scientists who had tried and failed to replicate Chandok's results and the fact that Chandok . . . did not readily provide them with key experimental materials. Klessig sent letters dated August 30, 2004 to NIH and NSF officials stating that for several months his postdoctoral researchers had been attempting to reproduce the NOS results reported by Chandok and had been unsuccessful. Each letter stated that the recent evidence strongly suggests that she falsified some of her data. From late August through mid-September, Klessig prepared and sent to Stern, Pola, and/or Chandok's coauthors of the Cell and PNAS articles drafts of statements to retract those articles. The drafts stated, with slight variations in wording, that members of the Klessig laboratory conducting further experiments had been unable to replicate the results reported in the Cell paper and that that inability suggested that the data on recombinant variant P may have been fabricated by the lead author. The retraction that was eventually [s]ent to PNAS [on] 9/14/04 by Klessig, Martin, and Ekengren read, in part, as follows: Since publication of th[e Cell ] paper, other members of the Klessig laboratory have been unable to repeat the results with recombinant variant P. In addition, other discrepancies have come to light that suggest data on the recombinant variant P presented in the Cell paper may have been fabricated by M.R. Chandokhence the Cell paper is being retracted. . . . . For this reason and the fact that we are no longer confident in much of the data in this paper, we hereby retract Chandok et al., 2004. M.R. Chandok does not concur with this retraction. . . . The experiments that produced these data were performed by M.R. Chandok and are now suspect. . . . We deeply regret this incident and sincerely apologize to our colleagues. A September 17, 2004 e-mail from one PNAS editor to another, stating that Klessig had contacted PNAS about the retractions of the Cell and PNAS articles, said that [i]t appears the first author, a former post doc in [Klessig's] lab, fabricated the data and spiked the samples to indicate iNOS activity. As this e-mail appears to reflect a communication by Klessig, Chandok imputes the charge of fabricat[ion] to Klessig (the Imputed Statement). On October 6, 2004, at a conference in Madrid, Spain, on plant disease, attended by many of the leaders in the study of plant pathology, Klessig announced the impending publication of the retractions. His notes in preparation for the conference indicate that he discussed Chandok's work, in part, as follows: Since publication of this work in Cell in 2003 several new postdocs have joined our group to study varP or the pathogen-inducible NOS. To date they have not been able to repeat the results with the recombinant variant P that were reported. In addition, other discrepancies have very recently come to light that strongly suggest that the data on the recombinant variant P is [ sic ] unreliable. Shortly after the Madrid conference, Klessig sent e-mails to fellow scientists who were interested in NOS research and had made contributions to Klessig's research, informing them that at the conference he had announced the retractions of the Cell and PNAS articles in light of his researchers' inability to replicate or confirm Chandok's reported NOS results. A November 5, 2004 article in Science magazine reported that the Cell and PNAS articles had been retracted. It quoted Klessig as saying that the data reported in those articles were shaky and that it was important that the rest of the scientific community not base their research on this [ sic ] unreliable data that we are no longer confident in. The BTI Scientific Misconduct Investigation Committee (or Committee), appointed by Stern in September 2004, proceeded to consider, inter alia, (a) the futile past efforts of Klessig's researchers to replicate Chandok's results, (b) a March 11, 2005 report of a successful effort by Abgent, a laboratory that Chandok hired to perform experiments using reagents that she furnished, and (c) unsuccessful new efforts by Klessig's laboratory to replicate the results reported by Abgent. In its final report, issued in June 2005, the Committee stated that [i]t should be noted that the verification by Abgent was not completely independent since Dr. Chandok had supplied the reagents used to perform NOS activity assays, and it found the evidence as a whole inconclusive: Based on the available evidence, the investigating committee found no conclusive evidence of data alteration or fabrication, but also no conclusive evidence that Dr. Chandok achieved the results reported. The Committee was critical of Chandok's procedures, finding several egregious breaches of commonly accepted scientific practice by Dr. Chandok, including her failures to maintain records and to archive research results. It stated that [t]he inability to recover the most important constructs reported in a high profile publication and the inability to reproduce published results, combined with the absence of corroborating detailed research records was judged to be grounds for good faith suspicion of scientific misconduct.