'Secret' panelists disclosed.

This article reports on the decision made by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to release the names of the two scientists who joined its ongoing inquiry into the allegations of scientific misconduct and fraud surrounding a research paper published in the April 25, 1986 issue of Cell. The paper described a novel mechanism for immune system regulation. Stewart Sell, an immunologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, Texas, and William R. McClure, a biochemist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, joined the original three-member panel in October 1989 and are now actively investigating the dispute, Suzanne W. Hadlet, acting director of the Office of Scientific Integrity of NIH. NIH initially refused to release their names because of the extreme publicity surrounding the dispute. The original panel released a report in February 1989 that cleared the cell coauthors of fraud, misconduct, manipulation of data, or serious conceptual errors. But NIH reopened its inquiry in April 1989 as allegations continued to surface, including congressional testimony from Secret Service agents who reported that someone had altered dates on laboratory pages describing key experiments published in the scientific paper.