"South African researcher [Dr. Werner Bezwoda, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg] has admitted that he falsified data, and is retracting a widely publicized study claiming that bone-marrow transplantation and high-dose chemotherapy could prolong the lives of women with advanced breast cancer....Dr. Peter Cleaton-Jones, chairman of University of Witwatersrand Committee for Research on Human Subjects, said in a telephone interview that Dr. Bezwoda's study had compared two groups of patients, an experimental group given the high-dose treatment and a control group that was supposed to have been given a more conventional treatment. Dr. Bezwoda reported that the high-dose group had fared much better than the controls. ‘But what he labeled as the control group was not accurate,’ Dr. Cleaton-Jones said. The control patients were given a completely different treatment from what was stated in Dr. Bezwoda's reports."
"On February 3, the University of Witwatersrand posted a news release on its Web site [http://www.wits.ac.za/depts/wcs/media/index.html] announcing the investigation of Dr. Bezwoda. It quoted a letter Dr. Bezwoda sent to colleagues on January 30, 2000, admitting that he had ‘committed a serious breach of scientific honesty and integrity’ and had misrepresented his results....The admission of fraud came only after a team of American scientists visited the researcher's laboratory to examine his records, and found that they did not match what he had reported."
