Cooking the books.

Can vitamins and minerals significantly bolster your immune system? If you believe they can, it may be because of the work of Ranjit Chandra, a once world-renowned Canadian scientist--and a former member of Nutrition Action's scientific advisory board--who is now living (comfortably) in disgrace.

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In 1992, Chandra published startling research in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet. It showed that healthy older people who took a simple multivitamin pill every day were half as likely to get sick as healthy seniors who took a dummy pill. Nutrition Action, along with The New York Times and many other publications, carried the news.

What the scientific world and the public didn't know at the time was that Chandra had been accused--by his research assistant at the Memorial University of Newfoundland and by an independent panel convened by the university--of pretending to recruit participants for his studies and then fabricating the results.

Confronted with the charges and unable to produce the data and the paperwork to prove that he really had carried out the studies, Chandra accused Memorial University of bias and threatened to sue. The university backed down and kept the accusations confidential.

But in 2000, Chandra pushed his luck too far. He submitted another extraordinary paper, this time to the British Medical Journal It showed that the same multivitamin pill he used in his 1992 research--which he by then had patented--could improve the memory and thinking skills of older people and perhaps prevent Alzheimer's disease.

The journal was suspicious. "This has all the hallmarks of having been completely invented," one of its reviewers warned. The journal rejected the paper.

Chandra got his results published in a less critical journal, where they caught the attention of two psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley. The pair pointed out glaring errors and statistical impossibilities in both the 2000 and the 1992 multivitamin studies. They accused Chandra of fraud.

(By that time, we had learned of the charges being circulated against Chandra and had removed him from our scientific advisory board.)

Meanwhile, the British Medical Journal alerted Memorial University to Chandra's possible research misconduct. Confronted once more, Chandra accused the university of losing his data during an office move. But the bluffing couldn't save him, and Chandra quietly resigned in 2002.

In 2005, the journal that had published Chandra's disputed 2000 study on multivitamins and memory retracted the article. While it is the only one of his studies that has been officially repudiated, doubts still linger over his other work.

Chandra reportedly splits his time between Switzerland and his native India, living off the $2 million (Canadian) that he squirreled away in 120 bank accounts around the world, according to his divorce proceedings.

For the transcript of a three-part 2006 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation investigation called "The Secret Life of Dr. Chandra," see cbc.ca/national/news/ chandra/index.html.