Former Purdue Veterinary Medicine Prof Agrees to 10-Year Exclusion for Research Misconduct
Alice C. Chang, formerly an associate professor of basic medical sciences in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Purdue University, “falsified and/or fabricated data from the same mouse models or cell lines by reusing the data, with or without manipulation, to represent unrelated experiments from different mouse models or cell lines with different treatments,” the HHS Office of Research Integrity (ORI) announced Dec. 13. The data was used in 384 “figure panels” in two awards funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and 14 applications NCI did not fund from 2014 to 2018. The falsified figures were also included in two published papers. ORI said Chang “neither admits nor denies ORI’s findings with respect” to the papers but did not mention whether she agreed with the other findings.
However, Chang agreed with ORI’s sanctions for the research misconduct, which call for her to exclude herself for 10 years from participating in federally funded programs, beginning Dec. 7. She also will “exclude herself voluntarily from serving in any advisory or consultant capacity to [the Public Health Service] PHS including, but not limited to, service on any PHS advisory committee, board, and/or peer review committee.” Chang will also request that the two papers be “corrected,” although it is not clear what type of corrections would be appropriate. ORI also has the authority to request retractions. The papers appeared in Cancer Research in 2015 and Oncogene in 2017.
