Tokyo Professor Asked to Redo Experiments.

The article reports that Japan's most prestigious university is investigating the basis of several papers published by a faculty member over the past 7 years. Officials at the University of Tokyo say it's the first case of its kind in the institution's history. The matter involves a group led by Kazunari Taira, a professor of chemistry and biological chemistry in the Graduate School of Engineering. Taira was unable to produce the raw data or experimental notes to support a string of papers from his lab that were published in top-tier journals, according to an interim report by an investigative committee looking into the matter. Yoichiro Matsumoto, a mechanical engineer who led the investigating committee, says that the case has caught university officials flat-footed. He says that they don't have an example of how such a situation would ordinarily be handled. Both Matsumoto and a university spokesperson say that this is the first time such an allegation has surfaced at the university, known as Todai. According to a report released by the investigating committee, the society questioned the reproducibility of the results reported in 11 papers that appeared between 1998 and 2004 in journals that include Nature, Nature Biotechnology, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.