Australian neuroscientist Bruce Murdoch nearly went to jail for making up data

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Australian neuroscientist Bruce Murdoch nearly went to jail for making up data

By Amy Ellis Nutt

Scientific integrity took another hit on Thursday when an Australian researcher received a two-year suspended sentence after pleading guilty to 17 fraud-related charges. The main counts against neuroscientist Bruce Murdoch were for an article heralding a breakthrough in the treatment of Parkinson's disease. And the judge's conclusions were damning.

There was no evidence, she declared, that Murdoch had even conducted the clinical trial on which his supposed findings were based.

UQ researcher Bruce Murdoch outside Brisbane Magistrates Court.

UQ researcher Bruce Murdoch outside Brisbane Magistrates Court.Credit: Kim Stephens

Plus, Murdoch forged consent forms for study participants, one of whom had died before the alleged study took place.

Plus, Murdoch fraudulently accepted public and private research money for the bogus study, published in 2011 in the highly reputable European Journal of Neurology.

"Your research was such as to give false hope to Parkinson's researchers and Parkinson's sufferers," said Magistrate Tina Privitera, who heard the case in Brisbane. Still to go to trial is Murdoch's co-author, Caroline Barwood, who has also been charged with fraud.

Since 2000, the number of US academic fraud cases in science has risen dramatically. Five years ago, the journal Nature tallied the number of retractions in the previous decade and revealed they had shot up tenfold. About half of the retractions were based on researcher misconduct, not just errors, it noted.

The US Office of Research Integrity, which investigates alleged misconduct involving National Institutes of Health funding, has been far busier of late. Between 2009 and 2011, the office identified three cases with cause for action. Between 2012 and 2015, that number jumped to 36.

While criminal cases against scientists are rare, they are increasing. Jail time is even rarer, but not unheard of. Last July, Dong-Pyou Han, a former biomedical scientist at Iowa State University, pleaded guilty to two felony charges of making false statements to obtain NIH research grants and was sentenced to more than four years in prison.

Han admitted to falsifying the results of several vaccine experiments, in some cases spiking blood samples from rabbits with human HIV antibodies so that the animals appeared to develop an immunity to the virus.

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"The court cannot get beyond the breach of the sacred trust in this kind of research," District Judge James Gritzner said at the trial's conclusion. "The seriousness of this offence is just stunning."

In 2014, the Office of Research Integrity had imposed its own punishment. Although it could have issued a lifetime funding ban, it only barred Han from receiving federal dollars for three years.

Republican Iowa senator Charles Grassley was outraged. "This seems like a very light penalty for a doctor who purposely tampered with a research trial and directly caused millions of taxpayer dollars to be wasted on fraudulent studies," he wrote to the agency. The result was a federal probe and Han's eventual sentence.

He belongs to a small but ignominious fraternity.

In 2006, Eric Poehlman, an expert on ageing and obesity at the University of Vermont, became the first American scientist sentenced to jail for research misconduct not involving fatalities. He received a one-year plus one-day prison term for fraudulent obesity research that, stunningly, spanned a decade.

Four years later, Scott Reuben, a prominent Massachusetts anaesthesiologist and researcher, was found to have faked data in at least 21 studies. Several of them touted positive results from popular painkiller medications. Reuben received six months in prison.

No US or international database of scientific retractions exists. But Ivan Oransky, the executive director of the Centre for Scientific Integrity, recently announced plans to change that. He said his non-profit would partner with the non-profit Centre for Open Science "to create a database of retractions designed to reduce waste in science and allow scholars to study the scientific literature in order to promote scientific integrity".

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