Daniel BuenoA scientific article that presented promising results involving a study on obesity was written by researchers who do not really exist. No one knows the five authors at the institution that supposedly hosts them, the School of Medical Sciences at the University of Thessaly, in Greece. Nor is there any record of them in the medical literature or the roster of research-funding agencies. The paper, published in the July 2013 issue of Elsevier’s Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications (BBRC) was quickly removed from the journal’s database, but it was not like the joke often played, whose intent is submitting for publication articles containing false content in order to reveal the weaknesses of the publication and peer review process in less rigorous journals.
Amazing as it may seem, the results outlined in the paper at issue are consistent: the finding that exaggerated expression of two proteins in fat cells produces improvements in metabolic processes related to diabetes and obesity in rats. Bruce Spiegelman, biologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, associated with Harvard University, recently arrived at these same conclusions and had presented them in six symposiums.
His next step was to prepare to submit them to a scientific journal. According to what he told the journal Nature, he thinks the fraud was devised to frustrate the publication of his study, which has now lost its uniqueness, and to harm the company he co-founded that was developing treatments for metabolic diseases. Spiegelman thought the article was suspicious as soon as he saw it because there are so few people in the world who are studying the subject and the findings were identical to those he obtained. On July 20, 2013, he sent an email to the journal’s editor, Ernesto Carafoli. He noted that he had found no other reference about the authors and that the email used by the corresponding author was private and not associated with any academic institution. Carafoli, a biochemistry professor at the University of Padua, Italy checked and determined it to be a fraud. “But the article was impeccable and whoever wrote it was clearly a researcher,” Carafoli says in his own defense.
The BBRC editor justifies the confusion as the result of the fact that the last name of the principal author, Vezyraki, is the same as a well-known researcher on obesity in Greece, whose first name is Patra, however, not Alkistis, the paper’s ghostwriter. In a note sent to the journal Nature, the publisher Elsevier admitted that it had been the target of fraud and reported that it is investigating the matter further to determine whether what appears to be Internet crime has indeed occurred.
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