Milena Penkowa Fraud Summary

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Description of the research fraud:

The Danish neuroscientist Milena Penkowa, an ex-professor of the University of Copenhagen, was a rising start in the scientific community for her important scientific contributions in the area of brain research1 with close to 100 peer-reviewed papers2, becoming the recipient of several important awards and obtaining millions in research funding1,2,3,4. Although questions about her scientific research started when her PhD thesis was rejected because of the suspiciously high number of experiments on rats she performed over a very short period of time1,2,4, it was only until much later when her students and colleagues were unable to replicate her scientific findings, that her work started to raise skepticism. Closer inspection of her research career by the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD) will later reveal that her scientific contributions were full of manipulation and fabrication of scientific data1,2. Moreover, Dr. Penkowa was accused of …show more content…

Additionally, one of the co-authors of several of Dr. Penkowa publications was also found guilty of academic and research misconduct for failing to detect Penkowa’s manipulation of the scientific data1.

Researchers responsible of scientific misconduct:

The main responsibility of this case of scientific misconduct resides with Dr. Milena Penkowa. However, Dr. Bente Klarlund Pedersen, a colleague and co-author in several of Dr. Penkowa seminal publications, also shares the responsibility of scientific misconduct for failing to identify and expose the obvious data manipulation of some of her publications from which she herself was benefited from.

Perpetration of the

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