Even as the debate over Mashelkar Committee report on Indian patent laws continues to rage, another example of ‘plagiarism’ has surfaced with the withdrawal of Dr Gopal Kundu’s paper from the US based Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), owing to allegations of data manipulation. On February 23, the JBC had withdrawn a paper by Kundu and his colleague Hema Rangaswami from National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS). Kundu, who is planning to move the court against the withdrawal, has termed the decision as “harsh”. Former Director of the Indian Institute of Science and eminent biotechnologist Govindrajan Padmanabhan said it was an unfortunate incident. “The decision is extremely harsh,” Padmanabhan, who was appointed as the Chairman of the government enquiry committee to look into the allegations of data manipulation, said.A journal normally withdraws a paper if experimental data is not reproduced by the scientists. It basically started with an anonymous e-mail sent to the Director of NCCS Dr G C Mishra. It was alleged that the same set of data submitted in a previous paper in 2004, was rehashed in another research paper (Rangaswami, Bulbule and Kundu, JBC, 280 (19), 1981-92) in 2005. “We set up an internal committee and decided that the matter needs to examined by experts from the scientific community. Hence, Padmanabhan along with a team of six scientists examined the issue,” Mishra said. Hema was called from the US as a part of the investigation as the paper was based on her research for a PhD . “Hema provided all the original data,” Padmanabhan said. The subject which has a bearing on cancer research explored the signal transduction pathways in response to various stimulations. The researchers have submitted a series of papers on the subject that explores how a signal from the external environment reaches the nucleus of the cell and what kind of molecules mechanisms of cancer are involved. “We have come to the conclusion that it is a case of compression of data. This is no misdoing. The same control data from one experiment has been used for another experiment. What could have been done was to put an asterisk or show a control blot,” said Padmanabhan. “We are convinced, however, that there is no evidence of manipulation,” he added. Kundu , an author of various research, papers including 14 papers in the JBC, said the journal has withdrawn the paper based on the second data (out of 51).
