RESEARCHER TO REPAY:  Chen Ching-shih, who is suspected of fabricating research, has to repay the institute NT$1.86 million in grants, investigators said

Taipei Times
Date: Jan 18, 2020
By: Chien Hui-ju and Dennis Xie  /  Staff reporter, with staff writer

Academia Sinica yesterday said that it would hand out punishments, including reclaiming NT$1.86 million (US$62,083) in grants, after a 20-month investigation into the case of a former research fellow who resigned after accusations of falsifying research.

Chen Ching-shih (陳慶士), a former head of Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biological Chemistry, was accused of fabricating data and images in research papers published from 2006 to 2014. He resigned as a cancer researcher from Ohio State University in 2017 and left Academia Sinica the following year.

Chen’s alleged misconduct was identified by Ohio State University, which said that on 14 occasions in eight articles, he “intentionally committed research misconduct” and was guilty of “deviating from the accepted practices of image handling and figure generation, and intentionally falsifying data.”

Following the Ohio report, Academia Sinica President James Liao (廖俊智) formed a special investigation team and handed the findings to its ethics committee, which yesterday said in a statement that Chen had breached its Code of Ethics by faking data and images in four of the 22 papers published during his time at the biology institute.    [FULL  STORY]