Reuters Investigation: Years after Brigham-Harvard scandal, U.S. pours millions into tainted stem-cell field, 2022

Faked heart studies by a once-obscure scientist duped the U.S. government and medical establishment for years. Washington is still paying for it.

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Mario Ricciardi, a young Italian molecular biologist, was thrilled when he was selected to work with one of Harvard Medical School’s most successful stem cell researchers.

His new boss, Dr. Piero Anversa, had become famous within the field for his bold findings in 2001 that adult stem cells had special abilities to regenerate hearts or even cure heart disease, the leading cause of U.S. deaths . Millions in U.S. government grants poured into Anversa’s lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Top journals published his papers. And the American Heart Association (AHA) proclaimed him a “research pioneer.”

“He was like a god,” recalled Ricciardi, now 39, one of several scientists to speak out for the first time about their experiences in Anversa’s lab.

Within a year of Ricciardi’s arrival in 2011, they grew suspicious, the scientists recalled. They couldn’t replicate the seminal findings of their celebrated boss and became concerned that data and images of cells were being manipulated. Anversa and his deputy gruffly dismissed their questions, they said.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/health-hearts-stem-cells/

 

An excerpt that leaves me wondering whether the same is happening at the UK’s NIHR that funds so many CBT studies:

“In a small and sometimes insular field, these researchers were often in a position to support one another, either as journal editors or members of NIH grant-making panels. Anversa served on an NIH advisory board, as well as an NIH grant review panel.

He was “unbelievably charming” and persuasive, said University of Washington’s Dr. Robb MacLellan, who served with Anversa on the same grant committee but described himself as skeptical of Anversa’s work because no one could replicate his results. Anversa, he said, was able to “package everything up in a true-believer sort of way and sell it.”