[Federal Register Volume 76, Number 247 (Friday, December 23, 2011)]
[Notices]
[Pages 80371-80372]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[FR Doc No: 2011-32914]


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DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES

Office of the Secretary


Findings of Research Misconduct

AGENCY: Office of the Secretary, HHS.

ACTION: Notice.

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SUMMARY: Notice is hereby given that the Office of Research Integrity 
(ORI) has taken final action in the following case:
    Gerald Lushington, Ph.D., Kansas University: Based on an inquiry 
conducted and written admission obtained by Kansas University (KU) and 
additional analysis conducted by ORI in its oversight review, ORI found 
that Dr. Gerald Lushington, Director of the K-INBRE \1\ Bioinformatics 
Core Facility, KU, and Director of the Molecular Graphics and Modeling 
Lab, KU, engaged in research misconduct in research supported by 
National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), National Institutes of 
Health (NIH), grant P20 RR016475.
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    \1\ K-INBRE: The KansasIDeA Network of Biomedical Research 
Excellence, which is a consortium of a number of schools and centers 
in Kansas.
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    Specifically, ORI found that Respondent engaged in research 
misconduct by approving publication of three articles and one abstract 
he knew contained significant amounts of plagiarized text without 
attribution or citation from other writers' published papers. The 
specific published documents as well as the relevant source documents 
are:
     Visvanathan, M., Adagarla, B., Lushington, G., 
Sittampalam, S., Proceedings of the 2009 International Joint Conference 
on Bioinformatics, Systems, Biology and Intelligent Computing, 2009, 
494-497. Greater than half (50%) of the total text was obtained from 
(1) Yang, C.-S., Chuang, L.-Y., Ke, C.-H., Yang, C.-H., International 
Journal of Computer Science, International Association of Engineers, 
August 2008 35(3),
    (2) Goffard, N. and Weiller, G., Nucleic Acids Research, 2007, 
35L:W176-W181, and (3) Chuang, L.-Y., Yang, C.-H., Tu, C.-J., Yang, C.-
H., Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Information Sciences, 
Atlantis Press, October 2006.
    Retracted: Retracted administratively by IEEE on Jan 5, 2011 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5260432
     Vijayan, A.; Skariah, B. E., Nair, B.; Lushington, G., 
Subramanian, S., Visvanathan, M., Proceedings of the IEEE International 
Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine Workshop, 2009, BIBMW2009, 
267-271. Approximately 15% of the text was plagiarized from Goffard, N. 
and Weiller, G., Nucleic Acids Research, 2007, 35L:W176-W181.
    Retracted: Retracted administratively by IEEE on Jan 5, 2011 http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/BIBMW.2009.5332106
     Visvanathan, M., Netzer, M., Seger, M., Adagarla, B. S., 
Baumgartner, C., Sittampalam, S., Lushington, G., International Journal 
of Computational Biology and Drug Design, 2009, 2,236-251. A complete 
paragraph of the text was plagiarized from Goffard, N. and Weiller, G., 
Nucleic Acids Research, 2007, 35L:W176-W181.
     Adagarla, B., Lushington, G., Visvanathan, M., ISMB 
International Conference, January 2009; the entire abstract for this 
poster was obtained by plagiarizing text from Pihur, V., Datta, S., 
Datta S., Genomics, 2003, 92:400- 403.
    Dr. Lushington has entered into a Voluntary Settlement Agreement 
(Agreement) and has voluntarily agreed for a period of two (2) years, 
beginning on December 6, 2011:
    (1) To have any U.S. Public Health Service (PHS)-supported research 
supervised; ORI acknowledges that

[[Page 80372]]

Respondent's research is currently being supervised by KU; Respondent 
shall ensure that a plan for supervision of his PHS-related duties is 
submitted to ORI for approval either within two weeks of this Agreement 
becoming final or prior to receiving or applying for PHS funds if such 
support is not current at the time this Agreement is completed; the 
supervision plan must be designed to ensure the scientific integrity of 
his research contribution; because of the ongoing review of 
Respondent's research by KU, ORI will only require a summary report on 
the first and second anniversary of the Agreement detailing how KU has 
ensured that Respondent's research and language in PHS grant 
applications and reports of PHS-supported research have been verified 
to be his own and accurately reported; Respondent agrees to maintain 
responsibility for compliance with the agreed upon supervision plan;
    (2) that this annual summary, provided by any institution employing 
him, shall provide assurance that each application for PHS funds, or 
report, manuscript, or abstract involving PHS-supported research in 
which Respondent was involved, was based on actual experiments or was 
otherwise legitimately derived, that the data, procedures, and 
methodology were accurately reported in the application, report, 
manuscript, or abstract, and that the text in such submissions was his 
own or properly cited the source of copied language and ideas; and
    (3) to exclude himself from serving in any advisory capacity to PHS 
including, but not limited to, service on any PHS advisory committee, 
board, and/or peer review committee, or as a consultant.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Director, Division of Investigative 
Oversight, Office of Research Integrity, 1101 Wootton Parkway, Suite 
750, Rockville, MD 20852, (240) 453-8800.

John Dahlberg,
Director, Division of Investigative Oversight, Office of Research 
Integrity.
[FR Doc. 2011-32914 Filed 12-22-11; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE 4150-31-P