Fraud study concludes that self regulation has failed

British Medical Journal, July 8, 2000 by Annette Tuffs

A task force investigating one of Germany's most spectacular cases of scientific fraud has found that the number of forgeries was more than expected and that more scientists may have been involved than previously thought.

The task force, headed by cell biologist Ulf Rapp of the University of Wurzburg, was looking into the fraud perpetrated by cancer specialists Friedhelm Herrmann of Berlin and Marion Brach of Lubeck. In 1997, they were found to have forged several publications and were dismissed from their university posts.

Both of them denied any wrongdoing and each accused the other of fraud. However, a committee at Freiburg University, where Professor Herrmann and Dr Brach had worked for several years, obtained evidence of their fraudulent practices.

The detective work was taken up by the Rapp task force, which was jointly financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Society) and the Krebshilfe, a cancer charity fund. The committee spent 18 months looking at more than 550 papers published by the oncologists.

Its report concludes that self regulation has obviously failed in the cases of Professor Herrmann and Dr Brach. Of 347 papers published by Professor Herrmann between 1985 and 1996, only 132 were cleared of any suspicion of fraud. In 94 papers data manipulation was apparent; 121 papers could not be completely cleared and may contain wrong data.

Most papers cover leukaemia research and the role of cytokines.

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