Red-Wine Researcher Charged With ‘Photoshop’ Fraud

Published January 15, 2012 | By Iowadawg

And since is an India (as a native of the big country of India), he does what all good liberals do, he cries RACISM!

A University of Connecticut researcher known for touting the health benefits of red wine is guilty of 145 counts offabricating and falsifying data with image-editing software, according to a 3-year university investigation made public Wednesday.

The researcher, Dipak K. Das, PhD, is a director of the university’s Cardiovascular Research Center (CRC) and a professor in the Department of Surgery. The university stated in a press release thatit has frozen all externally funded research in Dr. Das’s lab and turned down $890,000 in federal research grants awarded to him. The process to dismiss Dr. Das from the university is already underway, the university added

A university special review board (SRB) found evidence of research fraud in 2 dozen published papers dating back to 2002 as well as 3 grant applications. The university said it has notified 11 journals that published the studies of its findings. The publications include The American Journal of Physiology — Heart and Circulatory Physiology and the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology. Some of the studies asserted that a substance in red wine called resveratrol promoted heart health.

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The exact nature of the alleged fraud involves images of “blots” obtained through gel electrophoresis that were featured in article figures. Most of the figures presented Western blots, designed for studying proteins.

Using Photoshop software as a forensic tool, the review board determined that dozens of images bore evidence of inappropriate manipulation by “photo imaging software.” The most egregious examples were pasted-up “artificial blots” that “bear no resemblance to any legitimate experiment” and represent total fabrications. The board also found examples of background erasure, image duplication, and images having been spliced together.

The board noted that splicing various blot images together can serve a legitimate purpose but that researchers must precisely describe the manipulation that they perform. Such explanations were lacking in articles coming out of Dr. Das’s laboratory.

The review board report stated that as head of the lab and senior author of all but one of the tainted articles, Dr. Das “bears principal responsibility for the fabrication and/or falsification that occurred.” Furthermore, the evidence “strongly suggests” that Dr. Das was directly involved in faking images for publication. Some of that evidence was pulled from his personal computer.

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“I became the Devil for the Health Center, and so did all the Indians working for me,” he wrote. “The evidence for conspiracy and racial hatred is overwhelming.”