Dr. Gerald P. Schatten, a biologist at the University of Pittsburgh who was involved with Dr. Hwang Woo Suk and his discredited claim to have cloned human cells, was accused yesterday of "research misbehavior" by an investigative panel appointed by the university.
The panel found that Dr. Schatten did not learn of Dr. Hwang's fabrications until December, seven months after the article with his claim to have developed embryonic stem cells from 11 patients was published in Science.
The misbehavior, in the panel's view, lay in the fact that Dr. Schatten let himself be listed as senior co-author, even though he had performed none of the experiments, but "shirked" the responsibilities of verifying the data, "a serious failure that facilitated the publication of falsified experiments in Science.."
Neither Dr. Schatten nor his lawyer responded to e-mail messages. The university's press office said he would not be available for comment.
The panel's report, from which the university released just a summary, outlined the commingling of interests that developed after Dr. Schatten met Dr. Hwang in December 2003 at a conference in Seoul. Dr. Hwang told Dr. Schatten that he had cloned human cells, but that Science had just rejected his paper.
Dr. Schatten volunteered to help revise it, the panel said, and "lobbied hard for publication of this paper in Science, without any direct knowledge of the veracity of the data."
The paper was published in March 2004. The two men then began planning the 2005 paper, the report said, and early in the process Dr. Hwang invited Dr. Schatten to be the senior author.
By convention, a senior co-author receives major credit for the research and carries major responsibility for the accuracy of the data. Dr. Schatten accepted Dr. Hwang's offer, even though he had done none of the research and was not in a position to verify its accuracy.
A panel at Seoul National University has established that no human cells were cloned.
Dr. Schatten entered into the relationship with Dr. Hwang "not only to help a colleague whom he admired," the panel said, but also to gain some "reputational enhancement." He nominated Dr. Hwang for foreign membership in the National Academy of Sciences and a Nobel Prize.
At the same time Dr. Schatten accepted $40,000 in honorariums from Dr. Hwang and asked for a $200,000 research grant, which he hoped would be renewed every year.
When suspicions about Dr. Hwang's human cloning papers became public, Dr. Schatten was quick to distance himself. He told the Pittsburgh panel that he had written most of the text of the 2005 paper. Three weeks later, he told Seoul National University that he had not written the paper, the panel said.
After telling the panel at first that he was the senior co-author, Dr. Schatten later denied it, saying he was just one of two leading authors.
"This second version does not correspond with the fact, for example, that he is the one who responded to reviewers' comments," the panel said.
The panel, whose chairman was Dr. Jerome Rosenberg of the university's research integrity office, noted that Dr. Schatten's effort to distance himself from Dr. Hwang and his publications stood "in sharp contrast to the full participation of Dr. Schatten in the media spotlight following publication of the paper."
By failing to follow up on anomalies in what Dr. Hwang was telling him, Dr. Schatten, in the panel's view, "did not exercise a sufficiently critical perspective as a scientist." He also told Science that all 25 authors had read the manuscript before submission, a statement the panel called false.
Dr. Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association, said Dr. Schatten's behavior was "a textbook example of divorcing credit for papers from responsibility and accountability." It is acceptable to discuss a paper's merits with an editor before submission, but not during the review, Dr. Rennie said.
The editor of Science, Dr. Donald Kennedy, said, "If that's a sin, the jails will soon be full."
The lobbying for the 2004 paper "was not out of line, but it was toward the edge," Dr. Kennedy said. The lobbying, he added, had no influence on the publication decision, because Science had already invited Dr. Hwang to resubmit his paper.
