A senior academic currently suspended by the University of Liverpool is carrying out his own investigation into alleged data duplication and plagiarism in several of his 70 published papers.
Alirio Melendez was suspended from his position as chair of immunopharmacology at Liverpool in April following allegations that data in several papers on which he was an author were manipulated or copied from other work.
The subsequent investigation, in which two of Melendez's previous institutions -- the University of Glasgow and the National University of Singapore -- participated, led to the retraction of a paper published in February in the journal Nature Immunology, on which Melendez was the corresponding author.
"My mistake was to be too trusting," he said. "I realize I should have been more vigilant, but it is very difficult to know what is going on in a lab: more so when the principal investigator is in another continent."
The leaking of information from the investigation suggested there was a "campaign to smear my name," Melendez said. Full story
