Early last year, MD Anderson Cancer Center leadership had a problem on their hands: a contentious dispute between one of its most powerful researchers and a junior scientist over authorship, credit, and charges of verbal abuse. High-ranking officials at the cancer center tried — and failed — to resolve the feud, and documents obtained by STAT shed new light on the deep divisions at the heart of this case.
The Texas cancer center outsourced assessing the conflict between early-career nephrologist Jamie Lin and leading oncologist Padmanee Sharma to the law firm Ropes & Gray. The firm investigated the authorship and scientific credit portions of the dispute and concluded that Sharma was likely responsible for a scientific hypothesis at the heart of the feud and should be named as a co-senior author on a key manuscript.
But a separate investigation, commissioned by Lin and conducted by a former official at the federal Office of Research Integrity, tells a somewhat different story. That review looked into plagiarism after Sharma claimed Lin had wrongly omitted the senior researcher as an author from a manuscript built on research to which Sharma contributed. But this second investigation found no evidence of plagiarism between two manuscripts submitted to the journals Cancer Immunology Research and Journal of Clinical Investigation Insight.
Lin provided STAT with copies of an executive summary of the Ropes & Gray investigation as well as the conclusions of the plagiarism investigation. These documents are alluded to in legal filings but have not been previously reported. Lin has filed a lawsuit against Sharma in the Harris County District Court alleging retaliation, harassment, threatening, and intellectual theft by Sharma; she’s also asking for $5 million in damages.