Repeat Offenders: When Scientific Fraudsters Slip Through the Cracks

[Indigophoton]

SOMETIME AFTER 2010 — he isn’t exactly sure when — Richard Miller, a professor of pathology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, looked up a former faculty member who had worked in his lab on the popular government research database, Medline. When he saw that the researcher, Ricky Malhotra, was publishing new work out of the University of Chicago, Miller said he was “surprised and upset.” That’s because he knew something about Malhotra that he bet Malhotra’s new employers didn’t.

If someone had called Miller to discuss his former mentee, he could have told them Malhotra left his lab — which focuses on the genetics of aging — after confessing to fabricating data. It wasn’t a minor case: In 2007, Malhotra admitted to performing 60 percent or less of the approximately 80 experiments expected from him, among other infractions.

But no one called Miller, and now that he knew Malhotra was conducting research at another institution, he was torn. On the one hand, he thought “it would be good for the scientific community to call the University of Chicago and tell them what was going on,” Miller said. At the same time, the University of Michigan was still conducting an investigation of Malhotra’s misdeeds there, and that investigation was confidential. “I wasn’t sure,” Miller said, “how to reconcile those two separate obligations.”

https://undark.org/article/scientific-fraud-academic-fraud-universities/

 

[Alvin]

It seems to me that no one is very prepared for this or developed a proper system so these people fall through the cracks, they can work the system because its ill equipped to deal with malfeasance in a culture that hopes it doesn't exist.
There are solutions, from universal background checks to their professional institution revoking or putting on hold their credentials, to a unified database that institutions lookup candidates on to many other possible ideas that can be developed and implemented.
That privacy crap is a load of garbage, you commit fraud you should not be able to hide behind privacy. If its unproven or still under investigation then it can be mentioned that they are under investigation (with a few buzzwords or just under investigation) but a workable procedure for these cases is very achievable

Thaler also recommends to his clients that they tell a new employer they’re under investigation

Yeah right, and alternative facts come with a disclaimer that they are lies...