Appeals panel reverses fraud finding.

After nearly a decade of fighting charges of scientific misconduct, immunologist Thereza Imanishi-Kari has been cleared of wrongdoing by a federal appeals panel.

The Department of Health and Human Services panel concluded that the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), the division of HHS charged with investigating misconduct cases, had not proved its case against Imanishi-Kari. ORI had concluded that she intentionally fabricated experimental data that went into a 1986 paper published in Cell.

The panel rejected all 19 of the scientific misconduct charges brought against Imanishi-Kari. The ruling means that she no longer faces ORI's proposed 10-year ban on federal funding of her research.

The victory for Imanishi-Kari also affects Cell coauthor David Baltimore, a Nobel prize-winning molecular biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although Baltimore's scientific work in the Cell paper had never been in question, the long-running investigation had negative consequences for him. In 1991, he resigned as president of Rockefeller University in New York City (SN: 12/14/91, p. 399).

In explaining its decision, the appeals panel noted that some previous scientific reviewers who examined the Imanishi-Kari case had found "no evidence that scientific misconduct had occurred."

The panel also rejected the forensic analysis of Imanishi-Kari's laboratory notebooks, saying that it "provided no independent or convincing evidence that the data or documents were not authentic." ORI had cited that analysis, conducted by the Secret Service, as strong evidence that Imanishi-Kari had fabricated data underpinning the Cell paper (SN: 3/30/91, p. 196). The appeals panel also panned a statistical analysis by ORI that suggested Imanishi-Kari had committed fraud.

The 183-page HHS decision criticized ORI's probe of the Imanishi-Kari case. "Much of what ORI presented was irrelevant . . . was not credible or not corroborated, or was based on unwarranted assumptions," the panel concluded.