brother, Dr. Farr Nezhat, and a colorectal surgeon, Dr. Earl Pennington. Data collected for these two articles were found to be flawed. Opponents claimed that these mistakes were intentional and constituted research fraud. Proponents said that "the slight discrepancies in patient data had no impact on the paper's conclusions." It was reported that the journal's decision to retract the articles was motivated by fear of lawsuits because it had received dozens of complaints by the attorney, Jim Neal, since approximately 1993. In response to these growing concerns about Nezhat's work, in November 2000 Stanford put together a blue-ribbon committee, with former California Supreme Court Justice Edward A. Panelli as the lead investigator. The other committee members were an expert on medical ethics from UC Davis, and a retired dean from Harvard University School of Medicine. On December 21, 2001, after even more newspaper articles came out about Nezhat, Phil Pizzo, who had been appointed dean of Stanford's medical school in April 2001, announced that he had decided to suspend Nezhat and his two brothers until he could make more investigations into the matter. In August 2002 this ad-hoc committee released its findings. It determined that all of the allegations were unsubstantiated and without basis, concluding that none of the three Nezhat brothers had engaged in any misconduct. The Nezhats were reinstated to Stanford in August 2002. Concerning the allegation of research fraud, the committee reported that it did find that errors were made in the two retracted articles, but in none of the other hundreds of publications by the Nezhats that were reviewed. The committee and Stanford cleared the Nezhats of any wrongdoing, determining that the errors were minor, inadvertent, and had no impact on the paper's conclusions. Two state medical boards – from California and Georgia – launched their own investigation of Nezhat and also found him to be not guilty of any misconduct. References Further reading AAGL 2009 Honorary Chair Wallis, Claudia (April 28, 1986). "The Career Woman's Disease?". Time. Clark, Matt & Carroll, Ginny (October 13, 1986). "Conquering Endometriosis". Newsweek: 95. Cropper, Carol Marie (September 27, 2004). "Women's surgery: Less of an ordeal". BusinessWeek: 121-122. Gerencher, Kristen (February 7, 2005). "Robots as surgical enablers". MarketWatch. Wein, Josh (May 26, 2005). "Fertility surgery nets success 10 years later". San Francisco Examiner. Sadoughi, Marjan (February 10, 2006). "A baby at all costs". Mountain View Voice. Volume 14. No 7.