Ariel Fernández, a physical chemist and former tenured professor at Rice University, US, has been debarred for 15 years by the US government’s Office of Research Integrity (ORI) for research misconduct. This means that Fernández, who was born in Argentina and holds dual Argentine–American citizenship, is barred from receiving any US federal research funding or serving in any advisory role to the US government until late March 2041.
The ORI concluded earlier this month, based on ‘a preponderance of the evidence’, that Fernández ‘intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly’ fabricated or falsified data across 12 research papers supported by grants from the US federal government, four unpublished research papers, one presentation and three grant applications he submitted for funding from research agencies during his time at Rice. These alleged actions included manipulating Western blots, confocal microscopy images and the reported synthesis of six novel chemical compounds.
Debarments for research misconduct are typically for three years, making this one stand out. The ORI’s findings and 15-year sanction were upheld by an administrative judge a year ago.
The ORI’s announcement resolves an internal Rice investigation of Fernández that began in 2009 amid allegations that he manipulated images in a manuscript. At the time, he was a tenured professor at the university but he resigned in 2011 as part of a settlement agreement with the university that was obtained by Retraction Watch. Under the arrangement, Rice apparently paid Fernández $240,000 (£176,550) to leave Rice.
As part of its administrative actions against Fernández, the ORI plans to send a notice to the journals that published the 11 papers that require a retraction or a correction. Meanwhile, he has called the ORI’s actions an ‘attack’ and said they can be traced to a letter in the journal ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters that he published in 2021. In this letter to the editor he claimed that he ‘observed some anomalous facts’ about the genome of Sars-CoV-2 that supported the theory that the virus that causes Covid-19 escaped from a lab. Four months later, the letter received an expression of concern from the journal’s editor.
Fernández is currenlty the president of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology consultancy AF Innovation, which he founded in 2010. He also heads the company’s primary research arm, the Daruma Institute for Applied Intelligence.
No comments yet