A cardiologist’s career is in tatters after his former employers, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, conducted a review and concluded that data in 31 of his published studies was faked or falsified, according to The New York Times.
Piero Anversa, a former cardiologist, had become famous for his research suggesting stem cells could regenerate and bring damaged heart muscles back to life. Anversa first caught the medical world’s attention in 2001 when he published a paper that upended scientific understanding of how stem cells worked, reporting that heart muscles in mice could be regenerated when stem cells from bone marrows were injected into a damaged heart. But Anversa’s research was questioned extensively after researchers were unable to reproduce his results. Harvard and Brigham and Women’s launched investigatory reviews of Anversa’s work in January 2013, according to The New York Times. In April 2017, Brigham and Women’s paid $10 million to the federal government after it accused Anversa of submitting fake data to get research funding. Neither Harvard nor Brigham and Young h has commented to the Times about why it took so long for the retraction to take place, and Anversa could not be reached for comment.