John Darsee

• 33 years old
• Fellow in the lab of Eugene Braunwald at Brigham & Women's Hospital, Harvard Univ.
• In 1981 already published over 100 papers and abstracts while at Harvard and at Emory
• Offered a faculty position at Harvard
• Braunwald considered him the most remarkable of the 130 fellows who had passed through the lab
• Braunwald was considering setting up a lab for Darsee at Beth Israel Hospital
• He was a shining star in the field of drugs and other interventions that aid recovery from heart attacks

Events in the case:

1. Two fellows and a lab tech who worked with Darsee were suspicious of his accomplishments
2. Over a period of time they deduced that the abstract he was preparing contained no actual research
3. In May, 1981 they went to Dr. Robert Kloner, director of the lab, with their suspicions but no proof--Kloner was skeptical but he investigated anyway
4. Kloner asked Darsee to show him the raw data for the abstract; Darsee said he would pull some together
5. What he did instead was to go into the lab and make recordings from a single dog, charting them with dates and entries as if they were from several experiments, i.e., he made up the data while the fellows and lab tech watched!
6. Confronted, Darsee admitted to falsifying these data, but he denied any other wrong doing
7. Darsee was stripped of his NIH fellowship, his faculty appointment was withdrawn, but he was allowed to work in the lab and continue publishing
8. Braunwald and Kloner, after carefully going over all the data from other experiments, exonerated Darsee of further wrong doing
9. In October, 1981, the NIH questioned some data submitted by Braunwald's lab as part of a multi-institutional study, a study Darsee had worked on--Harvard's data were at variance with all the other institutions'--investigation showed that Darsee had doctored them, too
10. To shorten more recent history, 8 papers published while Darsee was at Emory have been retracted. 32 abstracts from Emory were found to have manipulated or invented data--coauthors on some of these abstracts didn't even know their names were on the abstracts
11. At Harvard 9 papers and 21 abstracts were withdrawn
12. Darsee was debarred from NIH funding and sitting on advisory bodies for 10 years
13. Further inquiry showed that Darsee falsified data while he was an undergraduate student at Notre Dame

The reasons for Darsee's infractions are not entirely clear.

• In one account he referred to the death of his father and his admiration for Braunwald.
• In another, he stated that although he had no recollection of falsifying data, he acknowledged the review panel's establishment of the fact of falsification and his personal role.
• In yet another, he asked "forgiveness for whatever I have done wrong."
• In still another, he said, "I had too much to do, too little time to do it in, and was greatly fatigued mentally and almost childlike emotionally. I had not taken a vacation, sick day, or even a day off from work for six years."
• A letter to Braunwald said, "I had put myself on a track that I hoped would allow me to have a wonderful academic job and I knew I had to work very hard for it."