I have never engaged in any unethical activity or academic misconduct.Īn investigation by Science found the problems in Newmaster’s work go well beyond the three papers. “I have never engaged in any unethical activity or academic misconduct.” He also said he had never made money from his network of businesses. “I have never committed data fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, or inadequate acknowledgment in the publications as claimed,” Newmaster wrote. But in a defense he sent to UG-which Science has also obtained-he denied all charges. Newmaster did not respond to interview requests or written questions. The letter was also signed by evolutionary biologist Paul Hebert, sometimes called the “father of DNA barcoding,” who directs UG’s Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (CBG). One paper, which compared the cost of DNA barcoding with traditional methods for cataloging forest biodiversity, was retracted last fall at the request of its junior author, Ken Thompson, now a Stanford postdoctoral fellow. “I felt that trust was betrayed,” says one of them, John Fryxell, executive director of the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario.
The accusers include co-authors of two of the suspect papers, who now say they believe Newmaster misled them. The group also charged that Newmaster “recurrently failed to disclose competing financial interests” in his papers. “The data which underpin are missing, fraudulent, or plagiarized,” the letter flatly stated. In a 43-page allegation letter, sent to UG in June 2021 and obtained by Science, the researchers-from UG, the University of Toronto, the University of British Columbia, and Stanford University-cited major problems in the study and two others by Newmaster and collaborators. It raised millions of dollars from herbal suppliers, boosting UG’s finances and prestige.īut in an ironic twist, eight experts in DNA barcoding and related fields now charge that the 2013 paper that indicted an entire industry and launched a new phase in Newmaster’s career is itself a fraud. In 2017, Newmaster also founded the Natural Health Products Research Alliance (NHPRA), a venture within UG that aims to improve certification technologies for supplements. He quickly went from industry adversary to ally, as major supplementmakers hired companies he created to certify their products as authentic.
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At Schneiderman’s request, major retailers such as GNC, Walgreens, and Walmart pledged to pull suspect products from the shelves or take other measures.Īlmost overnight, Newmaster became an authority on the verification of food and supplement ingredients. His work inspired then–New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to sponsor a similar study conducted by James Schulte, then at Clarkson University, who confirmed that consumers were often misled. “I go in to buy a product that I believe in, that I care about and I pay a lot of money for, and it’s not even in the bottle? Are you kidding me?” The findings “pissed me off,” Newmaster told PBS’s Frontline. The paper, published in BMC Medicine, received prominent attention from The New York Times, CBC, and many other media outlets.
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Most of the tested products contained different plants, were larded with inert fillers, or were tainted with contaminants that could cause liver and colon damage, skin tumors, and other serious health problems. The team published a study that used DNA barcoding-a system to identify species using small, unique snippets of genetic material-to test whether the bottles really contained what was printed on the label. In 2013, a team led by Steven Newmaster, a botanist at the University of Guelph (UG), took a hard look at popular herbal products such as echinacea, ginkgo biloba, and St.
A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 375, Issue 6580.