Alcohol research fraudster Michael W. Miller

Per ORI, one Michael W Miller, most recently Chair of Neuroscience and Physiology at SUNY Upstate Medical University, is a data faker.

ORI finds that the Respondent engaged in research misconduct by falsifying and/or fabricating data that were included in grant applications R01 AA07568-18, R01 AA07568-18A1, R01 AA006916-25, and P50 AA017823-01 and in the following:

The “following” included some paper retractions detailed over at the RetractionWatch blog.

One of the interesting things is that this guy published in decidedly normal journals. There was something in the ORI finding about a PNAS submission, but that seemed to be the high IF watermark for Miller. I make special note of this since I am one of those fond of pointing out the positive correlation between journal IF and retractions.

You will be unsurprised that my attention is drawn in this case to the grant support. That year -18 grant renewal application mentioned? It got converted into an R37 MERIT (10 yrs of non competing renewals instead of the usual 5) in the A1 version. Which means it was scored very highly, from what I deduce about the R37 process. The P50 is, of course, a Center.

Big monetary commitment for NIAAA and very prestigious for Professor Miller.

Boo, hiss, fraudster bad guy….

Except think about those folks who didn’t get something because if this guy. The Chair position was an external hire. The P50 took the place of another one- and it isn’t just the PI/PD. Each competing Center that didn’t get funded probably also had a handful of Component PIs. Who put in a lot of hard work and had a lot of great science. The R37? Well it probably counts at least double because of the 10 year interval. And of course some other worthy mid-career NIAAA scientist didn’t receive this honor for her work.

I’m irritated on behalf of anyone who applied to NIAAA for grant support and didn’t get the award during the interval they were supporting this Miller fraudster.

Final note. He was supposedly ratted out by someone in his lab. Since the offense seemed to be making up bar graphs rather than the all-too-typical duplicated gel/blot/image, there really would have been no other way to nail him. So the reviewers really can’t be blamed for missing anything.