In 2020, Nebove convicted the former vice-chancellor of the Karolinska Institutet, Karen Dahlmann-Wright, on charges of misconduct in the form of fraud. It was about manipulating several images in four different scientific articles. According to the board, Karen Dahlman-Wright was grossly negligent.

The case was appealed to the Administrative Court, which also concluded that fraud had occurred.

However, the court did not consider that Karen Dallman-Wright had acted with gross negligence, and therefore acquitted her. The Court of Appeal issued the same assessment, which was the ruling issued when the Supreme Administrative Court did not later grant permission to appeal.

And now it looks like there will be another twist.

At the end of January, Nabouf convicted another researcher at the Cancer Research Institute of misconduct in one of the articles in question – an article in the journal Cancer Research. According to Npof, the researcher acted with gross negligence.

The panel notes that the two figures in the article contain Western blots, a method of identifying and detecting proteins, which do not show what they are claimed to show. And some of these things are manipulated in that they are inverted and distorted versions of their originals.

The decision shows that the researcher previously admitted that he made changes to a figure in the final version of the article to which the other authors were not given access. According to the researcher, this is due to time constraints, as the deadline is approaching. The researcher also said that he did not save the scanned images, nor were the films stored in a safe manner in the laboratory.

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When the article is now back on the table, the researcher says in a new opinion that he does not remember exactly the pictures he used to prepare the figures. As before, he stated that the results presented in the article were consistent with what he observed in his experiments.

Overall, Nebove argues that the researcher was guilty of research misconduct.

The Council also makes an assessment that there may be other deviations from good research practice other than research misconduct. It concerns, among other things, that the researcher in question did not inform the co-authors of the changes in the final version of the article. The Board also finds that there are deficiencies in data processing as scanned images and films are not saved in the original version. The committee hands over these doubts to the Karolinska Institutet.

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