If you're going to lie to someone about your work, don't do it in science.
If you're going to lie to someone about your scientific work, don't do it in biomedical research and especially not when researching potential gene therapies.
If you're going to lie about your gene therapy findings, don't do it repeatedly and egregiously for almost a decade and never do it to the source of your funding.
Dr. Li Chen did all that. The NIH (and by extension, the US Dept. of Health and Human Services) is not pleased with him. It's bad enough that his former lab had six retractions all around the same time in 2010. Dr. Chen was intimately involved in the whole mess.
His punishment is essentially a 3-year ban from federal funding and involvement. I'm inclined to think that the investigations and retractions are damning enough. This guy now has a smoldering crater in his CV. Even once he's eligible for federal funding again, I suspect he'll have some trouble getting his grant applications approved. That's a life-threatening condition in any field of science.
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