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. He then moved to Harvard University, where he worked as research fellow at the Cardiac Research Laboratory. Darsee produced 5 major papers in his first 15 months at Harvard. 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. When informed, Braunwald terminated Darsee's fellowship but did not inform the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which was funding the research, of Darsee's misconduct at the time. Braunwald and Kloner conducted their own investigation into Darsee's work and found no other evidence of fraud; nor did a committee of Harvard faculty appointed by the Dean of the medical school. 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. The NIH review found that Darsee had committed wide-ranging scientific misconduct, fabricating large amounts of data from experiments which he had never conducted. Harvard's investigation, as well as that of Braunwald and Kloner, were criticized for being inadequately rigorous and for reporting that they had "fully reviewed" data which later turned out to be non-existent. 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