Thereza Imanishi-Kari

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Thereza Imanishi-Kari (born 1943 in Brazil) is an Associate Professor of Pathology at Tufts University.

She received her B.S. in Biology from the University of São Paulo in Brazil; her Ph.D. in Immunogenetics from the University of Helsinki in Helsinki, Finland; and did her postdoctoral training at the University of Cologne in Cologne, Germany. She joined the Tufts University faculty in 1986 at the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences where she is an Associate Professor of Pathology.

Imanishi-Kari is best known for her role in an affair of alleged scientific misconduct. In 1986, Imanishi-Kari had co-authored a scientific paper on immunology with David Baltimore. The paper, published in the scientific journal Cell, showed unconventional results on how the immune system rearranges its genes to produce antibodies against antigens it encounters for the first time. Margot O'Toole, a researcher in Imanishi-Kari's lab, could not reproduce some of the experiments in the paper and accused Imanishi-Kari of fabricating the data. Since the research had been funded by the U.S. federal government through the National Institutes of Health, the matter was taken up by the United States Congress, where it was aggressively pursued by, among others, Representative John Dingell. Largely on the basis of these findings, NIH's fraud unit, then called the Office of Scientific Integrity, accused Dr. Imanishi-Kari in 1991 of falsifying data and recommended she be barred from receiving research grants for 10 years. Due to the ensuing controversy, in 1991 Baltimore was forced by his scientific peers to resign from the presidency of Rockefeller University, to which he been appointed only one year earlier. An extensive file on the case, collected by the mathematician Serge Lang, was published in the journal Ethics and Behaviour in January 1993. In 1996, a newly-constituted HHS appeals panel, appointed by the federal government reviewed the case again and dismissed the charges of misconduct against Imanishi-Kari.