Swedish stem cell “pioneers” are found guilty of research misconduct

Two Swedish professors, hailed as pioneers in the field of stem cell transplantation, have been found guilty of misconduct by their employer, Gothenburg University, after they falsely claimed to have obtained ethics approval for unproven operations that they carried out on three children.

Two of the transplants had poor final outcomes, but all were reported as successful in articles in EBioMedicine1 and in a 2012 article in the Lancet which has been cited 52 times.2 International media reported the work as a potential breakthrough in transplantation science.3

The work of stem cell researcher Suchitra Sumitran-Holgersson and surgeon Michael Olausson was investigated because …