Associated Press - November 28, 2007

In a report issued at the end of 2003 following a 16-month probe, the three investigators recommended that Scott J. Brodie be banned from future employment. Brodie, an assistant professor whose work included research into cellular responses to HIV, resigned six months before the report was issued.

The report has been provided to federal investigators, who have not issued any findings.

Brodie now lives and works on the East Coast, and his Seattle lawyer couldn't be reached for comment, The Times said.

In written responses and interviews with the investigators, Brodie at times denied any wrongdoing, on other occasions claimed that images were "inadvertently mislabeled" and suggested that laboratory technicians could have been to blame for errors.

Describing as his responses as "disingenuous" and "damning," the investigators wrote that he had falsified data in 15 instances in published and unpublished journal articles and in grant proposals. All of his research is now "viewed with suspicion" and subject to independent verification, the investigators concluded.

"Accepted scientific practices do not allow a scientist to falsely label an image as suits his or her fancy simply because such work is conducted in the scientist's lab," the investigators wrote. "To do so is instead a gross deviation of accepted scientific practices."

The report was an unpleasant jolt to many other researchers who relied on his data, said H. Denny Liggitt, chairman of the school's Department of Comparative Medicine and one of the investigators.

"The problem with things like this is that people build on someone else's knowledge. It wastes money, it wastes time and it can lead science in a wrong direction," Liggitt told The Times. "Even the smallest misguidance can cripple a very large investigation."

The report was released Tuesday after a tug-of-war that began in January when The Times requested all findings of academic misconduct at the university dating back five years. Under the pseudonym "John Doe," Brodie sued the school and the newspaper in King County Superior Court to try to block release of his records.

Last week, Brodie's request for a preliminary injunction to keep the report under wraps was rejected by Judge William L. Downing.

A "thorough investigation" determined that a public employee committed research misconduct, so "the public certainly has a legitimate interest in knowing that outcome, the underlying facts and the process by which they were found," Downing wrote.

Brodie graduated from Washington in 1982, earned a doctorate in veterinary medicine from Washington State University in 1989, later earned a doctorate in infectious diseases from Colorado State University and was briefly an instructor at Harvard University.

He told the investigators he was recruited by Washington in 1996 to direct the retrovirus laboratory of Dr. Lawrence Corey, chief of virology in the school's Department of Laboratory Medicine.

Liggitt said the investigation began after a rival researcher, who was reviewing a paper Brodie submitted for publication, reported some apparent anomalies to the federal Office of Research Integrity, which alerted school officials in August 2002.

The next month, according to the report, doctors and security personnel confiscated nine computer hard drives, computer disks, laboratory notes and office files from Brodie's lab. In addition, two doctors retrieved a computer from his house.

That December, Brodie was ordered to work at home, and the keys to his lab and his key card were confiscated.

In January 2003, with evidence removed to more secure locations at the university, Brodie was allowed back on campus. He resigned that June.

Investigators wanted to be extremely thorough to give Brodie the benefit of the doubt, but the deeper they looked, the more problems they found and it became clear that Brodie had been increasingly manipulating computer images and falsifying data, Liggitt said.

"It was a very traumatic investigation to be involved with," Liggitt said. "We got to look at the underbelly of science."

Even though Brodie used faulty methods, his conclusions were found to be correct by other scientists in the paper that led to the investigation, a report that HIV - the virus that causes AIDS - continues to replicate in certain cells, even in people taking potent antiretrovirals, Corey said.

"Did he set back crucial research? The answer is no," Corey asserted.

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