PHILADELPHIA — A longtime University of Pennsylvania scientist has left the school amid an investigation into “inconsistencies” in five experiments that involved injuring the brains of piglets and juvenile pigs, the results of which have now been retracted by the scientific journals that published them.
William M. Armstead has shut down the lab where he did the research, testing various drugs to treat the pigs so as to identify possible therapies for humans with traumatic brain injury. As described in the published findings, several of the drugs appeared to hold promise. But in each case, Armstead told the journals that the published data did not match the results that his team recorded when doing the experiments, editors wrote in notices of the retractions.
Neither the journals nor Penn officials provided details about the discrepancies in the results, such as whether they were the result of mistakes or deliberate misconduct. But given that issues arose on five separate occasions, the latter scenario is plausible, said physician Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch, the science news site that first reported on Armstead’s departure.
