STAT+: Muzzled for years, vindicated MIT professor says fraud investigation into his lab did lasting damage
For three years, nine months, and one week, MIT professor Ram Sasisekharan lived under a gag order. Now he's speaking out.
For three years, nine months, and one week, Ram Sasisekharan lived under a gag order. In 2019, some of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor’s peers publicly accused his lab of falsifying research, setting in motion a lengthy internal investigation that sidelined his work, decimated his team, and barred him from speaking out in his own defense.
“The feeling was that we were guilty of something until we were proven innocent,” Sasisekharan, a decorated scientist whose work helped launch six biotech companies, said in an interview with STAT. “There were times I would wake up wondering if it had all been a nightmare.”
The charge was that Sasisekharan and his colleagues committed the age-old academic sin of copying someone else’s work and passing it off as their own. MIT mounted an internal review of the allegations, and school policy mandated that all parties keep the whole thing confidential. In normal circumstances, that would have kept the proceedings within the school’s walls. But because Sasisekharan’s accusers published their allegations in a scientific journal, albeit a niche one, he could only sit in silence amid a public conversation over whether he was a fraud.
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