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At Temple, two scientists fight over a claim of stolen heart research and a start-up that’s selling for $53 million - The Philadelphia Inquirer
Sep 23, 2022 1 min, 42 secs
A scientific dispute has led to a federal lawsuit involving two prominent researchers: a former dean of Temple’s medical school and a past president of the American Heart Association.

At the root lie professional pride and animosity between two prominent researchers — Feldman, a former dean of Temple’s medical school, and Houser, a past president of the American Heart Association.

At issue was an image of mouse heart cells that looked to the Harvard officials as if it might have been fabricated, according to Houser’s lawsuit.

And the following year, the school notified Houser it was investigating potential misconduct on an additional series of papers on which he was an author, this time at the request of federal officials.

The real reason for the Temple inquiries, Houser contends, is that school officials sought to “malign” and intimidate him into dropping his complaints about the pig samples and related data, which his grad student had given to Feldman’s lab in late 2014.

In the lawsuit, Houser accused Feldman, then the dean, of deliberately misleading the graduate student into turning over the material.

Houser says he never gave permission, and that he did not learn of the exchange until 2017, when Feldman published a paper relying partly on the data.

Temple officials declined to comment on the lawsuit beyond what its attorneys have said in court.

The parties to the lawsuit agree on one thing: Feldman omitted Houser’s name from an earlier April 2015 paper in which he included the results from additional experiments on the pig samples.

When Houser became aware of the omission two years later and complained, Feldman said it was a mistake and apologized.

He asked editors at the journal, Heart Failure Reviews, if they could add Houser’s name, but they said it was too late, according to an email exchange included in court exhibits.

After Houser’s name surfaced in the Harvard inquiry, Feldman repeatedly told other faculty members that Houser was at fault and spread false rumors about the ensuing Temple inquiry in 2019, Houser alleged.

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