Saturday, April 07, 2007

Does Cha have a problem SINCE the CIRM grant?

Bruce Flamm in 42 Ob. Gyn News. 8 (March 15, 2007) wrote:

The Korean journal confirmed the plagiarism charges. Dr. Cha did not respond to requests seeking comment. Dr. Jeong-Hwan Kim, author of a Korean study on women with premature ovarian failure, was shocked to learn that his paper had been plagiarized and alerted editors at Fertility and Sterility. Dr. DeCherney told The Scientist magazine that Dr. Cha and his coauthors had each signed a statement verifying that the work had not been previously published. “So they perjured themselves,” Dr. DeCherney noted. Dr. DeCherney, who also is head of reproductive biology at the National Institutes of Health, added that the incident was a “blight on the field.” As for Dr. Cha's 2001 prayer study, Dr. DeCherney told the Chronicle of Higher Education that Fertility and Sterility had seen the manuscript before it was sent to the JRM and rejected it. “It's baloney,” he said. “That's not in question.”

IPBiz notes that, based on material on californiastemcellreport, Dr. Cha has responded to, and denied, the plagiarism charges. Refer to the IPBiz post
Further fulminations in CIRM's Cha-Gate . There are some nuances here. The instructions to authors of Fertility & Sterility do require a statement asserting that the material has not been published before. There is a SEPARATE required statement about conflicts of interest. IF F&S indeed has both statements in its files, then the Cha folks have some problems. The Cha folks will have further problems if they did not disclose the Korean patent application.

On the point about the omission of Dr. Kim as an author of the F&S paper, there seems to be some disagreement over facts. IPBiz surmises that Dr. Kim's work may have been ACKNOWLEDGED in the initial submission, but that Dr. Kim was not named an author. To get to the bottom of this, one needs merely to see the initial submission. If the surmise of IPBiz is correct, then Dr. Lee is NOT ONLY likely guilty of plagiarism and copyright infringment BUT ALSO Lee and Cha have misrepresented in the last month what happened in the F&S submission as to Kim as author. Since this misrepresentation would have occurred AFTER the CIRM grant, it is relevant to the CIRM grant.

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