John Darsee

John Roland Darsee (born in Huntington, West Virginia) is an American physician and former medical researcher. After compiling an impressive list of publications in reputable scientific journals, he was found to have fabricated data for his publications.

Education and research career John Darsee obtained his undergraduate education at the University of Notre Dame, then went to medical school at Indiana University, where he received a degree in 1974.

Darsee had an excellent reputation as a student and medical researcher. He worked at Emory University from 1974 to 1979, serving as chief medical resident at Grady Memorial Hospital. The head of his lab, cardiologist Eugene Braunwald, considered Darsee the most remarkable of the 130 fellows who had worked in his lab and offered Darsee a faculty position at Harvard in 1981. Some of Darsee's colleagues became concerned about the accuracy of Darsee's results. They went to the lab director, Robert Kloner, with their suspicions. Kloner investigated and found that Darsee had been altering dates on his laboratory work to make a few hours' work appear to be several weeks of data. However, in October 1981 discrepancies between Darsee's data and those collected by other centers performing similar work triggered a formal investigation by the NIH. Darsee was barred by the NIH from receiving federal research funding for 10 years. Brigham and Women's Hospital, affiliated with Harvard, had to return $122,371 in research funds to NIH. This was the first time an institution was required to return money to NIH because of research fraud.

Wider misconduct Over time, more research by Darsee came under fire. Investigations revealed that Darsee had previously used false data between 1966 and 1970, while an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame. Following the NIH investigation, Harvard retracted 30 of Darsee's papers and abstracts in February 1983. Review of Darsee's earlier work at Emory University led to the retraction of an additional 52 papers and abstracts published during his tenure there.

Aftermath Darsee maintained that he had "no recollection" of committing research fraud.

Darsee subsequently entered a clinical fellowship in critical care at Ellis Hospital in Schenectady, New York. He is now working as a medical writer and blogger under the name of John Hughes-Darsee and living with his wife, Linda Hughes, a surgical nurse, and two children in West Nyack, New York.