BLURRED IMAGE. A U.S. journal and an Indian panel have lined up on opposite sides in a case of alleged plagiarism involving a young Indian researcher whose degree hangs in the balance.
Early last year, an anonymous e-mail claimed that a 2005 paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) co-authored by Hema Rangaswami, then a Ph.D. student at the National Centre for Cell Science in Pune, India, contained images that appeared in an earlier JBC paper by the same authors. Last month, JBC withdrew the paper. Shelagh Ferguson-Miller, chair of JBC's publications committee, says a computer-assisted analysis found that two control blots were identical to images that had been labeled differently in a 2004 publication. "To us, it seemed there had been deliberate misrepresentation," she says. The paper examines signaling pathways involved in the development of skin cancer.
CREDIT: SOURCE: HEMA RANGASWAMI
Five months before the retraction, however, a scientific panel set up by the Indian government to investigate the charge found no evidence of image duplication or misconduct. Govindarajan Padmanabhan, a biologist at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, who headed the Indian panel, says the panelists grilled the researchers and examined original data.
Rangaswami received a provisional degree last year and now works as a postdoc at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Her supervisor, UCSD cancer biologist Renate Pilz, says she has reviewed Rangaswami's work and believes the JBC paper is valid. Right now, Rangaswami has more on her mind besides completing her defense: This month, she gave birth to her first child.
