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The chief of a cancer surgery division at Columbia University this week had five research articles retracted and a sixth tagged with an editor’s note, underscoring concerns about research misconduct that have lately bedeviled Columbia as well as cancer labs at several other elite American universities.
With the latest retractions, the Columbia lab, led by Dr. Sam Yoon, has had more than a dozen studies pulled over suspicious results since The New York Times reported in February on data discrepancies in the lab’s work.
The retracted studies were among 26 articles by Dr. Yoon and a more junior collaborator that a scientific sleuth in Britain, Sholto David, revealed had presented images from one experiment as data from another, a tactic that can be used to massage or falsify the results of studies.
Dr. Yoon’s more junior collaborator, Changhwan Yoon, no longer works in the lab, Columbia said in response to questions on Wednesday. But the university has said little else about what, if anything, it has done to address the allegations.
Since the Times article in February, Dr. Yoon’s name has been changed from Sam Yoon to S. Sunghyun Yoon on a Columbia website advertising surgical treatment options. Because of the change, the Columbia surgeon who is being promoted to many patients has a name that no longer matches the one Dr. Yoon used to publish his retracted studies. A Columbia hiring announcement from several years ago was also recently edited to change the rendering of Dr. Yoon’s name, according to web page archives.
Columbia said that faculty members were responsible for any name changes on departmental web pages. The university declined to comment on the retractions. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where Dr. Yoon worked when much of the questionable research was done, also declined to comment, saying only that it reviews such cases.
Dr. Yoon did not answer emailed questions about his research or his name change. His more junior collaborator, Changhwan Yoon, who is of no relation, could not be reached for comment.
Research misconduct experts said the hands-off response by Columbia risked doing harm to patients’ faith in the hospital treating them.
“Sam — or S. Sunghyun — remains in place as a researcher and a surgeon,” Dr. David said, noting that nothing was stopping Dr. Yoon from asking patients to participate in research studies. “How can they make informed decisions if something as basic as their surgeon’s name is obfuscated?”
A Columbia-affiliated state psychiatric institute has also lately faced questions about its oversight of research studies. During a clinical trial at the institute that began in 2019, a participant died by suicide. Federal regulators later suspended research on human subjects at the institute.
This month, a federal watchdog found that the former Columbia psychiatry professor who oversaw the clinical trial had “recklessly” and “falsely” reported that participants met the criteria for depression studies. Members of the researcher’s lab told The Transmitter, a neuroscience news outlet, that the lab had often prioritized research over the well-being of participants.
“Columbia, like every institution, probably should take a hard look at what’s going on and see whether there’s something about the way they are supervising their leading researchers or creating an environment where people feel some pressure or something like that, because it’s not the first time,” said Dr. Ivan Oransky, the editor in chief of The Transmitter and a founder of Retraction Watch, which keeps a database of over 50,000 retracted papers.
The Columbia cancer lab’s latest retractions came from two medical journals — Cancer Research and Clinical Cancer Research — published by the American Association for Cancer Research. Dr. David first alerted the association to his concerns about research from Dr. Yoon’s group a year ago.
A third medical journal published by the association contains additional studies by Dr. Yoon and his collaborators with data discrepancies that have yet to be addressed.
Dr. Yoon, a stomach cancer specialist and a proponent of robotic surgery, was the senior author overseeing all five studies retracted this week, which examined strategies for mitigating the growth of tumors. He worked on three of them with his more junior collaborator, Changhwan Yoon, and on two of the studies separately.
The pace of the latest retractions highlighted how sluggishly publishers move to acknowledge duplicated images and suspicious results — if they acknowledge them at all. As a result, erroneous findings remain in the scientific record, influencing decisions by research funding bodies, scientists and doctors.
In this case, the retractions reinforced concerns about nonprofit membership groups, like the association for cancer research, that double as publishers. The association draws nearly a quarter of its roughly $84 million in annual revenue from its publications, which make money from article processing fees and subscriptions.
It draws substantial additional revenue from its members — the research scientists who pay dues, attend conferences and publish studies in its journals. That can create a conflict, research misconduct experts said: Pulling a study because of manipulated data often puts a scientific society at odds with the very scientists who are its authors, members and key constituents.
“Are they going to do everything they can to correct the record if those people are involved?” Dr. Oransky said. “The answer has been pretty resoundingly no.”
Christine Battle, the publisher and vice president of scientific publications at the cancer research association, said the organization “follows best practices among scientific, technical, and medical journals regarding article corrections and retractions.”
In several cases, the cancer research association has bestowed awards upon scientists who faced accusations of research misconduct or chosen such scientists to edit its medical journals.
In 2020, Dr. Yoon himself was featured on the American Association for Cancer Research website upon being named a principal scientist on a stomach cancer initiative. The initiative was led in part by Sandra Ryeom, now an associate professor of surgical sciences at Columbia, who, as of 2021, was married to Dr. Yoon, according to mortgage documents.
Dr. Ryeom, who did not respond to emailed questions, was an author on three of the studies retracted this week.
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