The results of a new clinical trial have overturned the “wait and see” approach that cardiologists have long favored for symptom-free patients.For decades, people with failing heart valves who nevertheless felt all right would walk out of the cardiologist’s office with the same “wait and see” treatment plan: Come back in six or 12 months. No reason to go under the knife just yet.A new clinical trial has overturned that thinking, suggesting that those patients would be much better off having their valves replaced right away with a minimally invasive procedure.The trial, whose results were published this week in The New England Journal of Medicine, could change the way doctors treat severe aortic stenosis, a narrowing of the valve that controls blood flow from the heart. The disease, which has a prognosis worse than that of most cancers, afflicts more than 3 percent of people ages 65 and older. It is expected to become more common as people live longer.Replacing people’s heart valves, even if they were not yet experiencing any ill effects, appeared to roughly halve their risk of being unexpectedly hospitalized for heart problems over at least two years, the trial found.Patients who were put on the more conservative treatment plan overwhelmingly ended up needing surgery anyway: Roughly 70 percent of them developed symptoms and needed to have their valves replaced within two years, suggesting that the disease worsens more quickly than previously understood.“You may be able to at least prevent that progression and perhaps improve patient outcomes by treating earlier,” said Dr. Gregg Stone, a professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, describing the implications of the trial. The findings, he said, “will have a major effect on practice.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The presidential candidate’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was a breast cancer researcher whose egalitarian politics often bucked a patriarchal lab culture.On her first day of work, the young bioengineering major climbed down the basement steps of a cancer laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and caught sight of someone summarily beheading a mouse.The student, Elizabeth Vargis, felt faint. She grasped for a chair. A child of Indian immigrants whose dipping grades had just cost her a scholarship, she reckoned her difficulty staying upright spelled the end of her research career, too.Her new boss, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, took a different view. A slight woman of 5 feet with a siren of a laugh, Dr. Gopalan Harris listened a few days later as her student reproached herself for being an inadequate scientist, and then cut in with a question: “Did you eat that day?”The younger biologist had not.“You have to eat!”The reply was not exactly warm — more “are you stupid?” than “I’m so sorry you fainted,” Ms. Vargis said. Nor was it as ready-made for a meme as Dr. Gopalan Harris’s aphorisms, like the one about the coconut tree, that caught the imagination of voters online during her daughter Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.But in the professor’s admonition, Ms. Vargis heard an echo of her own Indian aunties, and an affirmation that she belonged in a scientific world where neither she nor her professor had ever felt entirely at home.“She wanted me to be in that room,” said Ms. Vargis, who earned her doctorate and now runs a lab at Utah State University, a career that she credits in part to Dr. Gopalan Harris. “She wanted to give everybody a chance, an equal chance.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Dr. Sam Yoon and a collaborator duplicated images across their research studies over many years. The collaborator has left Columbia.The chief of a cancer surgery division at Columbia University this week had five research articles retracted and a sixth tagged with an editor’s note, underscoring concerns about research misconduct that have lately bedeviled Columbia as well as cancer labs at several other elite American universities.With the latest retractions, the Columbia lab, led by Dr. Sam Yoon, has had more than a dozen studies pulled over suspicious results since The New York Times reported in February on data discrepancies in the lab’s work.The retracted studies were among 26 articles by Dr. Yoon and a more junior collaborator that a scientific sleuth in Britain, Sholto David, revealed had presented images from one experiment as data from another, a tactic that can be used to massage or falsify the results of studies.Dr. Yoon’s more junior collaborator, Changhwan Yoon, no longer works in the lab, Columbia said in response to questions on Wednesday. But the university has said little else about what, if anything, it has done to address the allegations.Since the Times article in February, Dr. Yoon’s name has been changed from Sam Yoon to S. Sunghyun Yoon on a Columbia website advertising surgical treatment options. Because of the change, the Columbia surgeon who is being promoted to many patients has a name that no longer matches the one Dr. Yoon used to publish his retracted studies. A Columbia hiring announcement from several years ago was also recently edited to change the rendering of Dr. Yoon’s name, according to web page archives.Columbia said that faculty members were responsible for any name changes on departmental web pages. The university declined to comment on the retractions. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where Dr. Yoon worked when much of the questionable research was done, also declined to comment, saying only that it reviews such cases.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Four years ago, Casey Harrell sang his last bedtime nursery rhyme to his daughter.By then, A.L.S. had begun laying waste to Mr. Harrell’s muscles, stealing from him one ritual after another: going on walks with his wife, holding his daughter, turning the pages of a book. “Like a night burglar,” his wife, Levana Saxon, wrote of the disease in a poem.But no theft was as devastating to Mr. Harrell, 46, as the fading of his speech. He had sung his last Whitney Houston song at karaoke. A climate activist, he had delivered his last unassisted Zoom presentation to fellow organizers.Last July, doctors at the University of California, Davis, surgically implanted electrodes in Mr. Harrell’s brain to try to discern what he was trying to say. That made him the latest test subject in a daunting scientific quest, one that has attracted deep-pocketed firms like Elon Musk’s company Neuralink: connecting people’s brains to computers, potentially restoring their lost faculties. Doctors told him that he would be advancing the cause of science, but that he was not likely to reverse his fortunes.Yet the results surpassed expectations, the researchers reported on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, setting a new bar for implanted speech decoders and illustrating the potential power of such devices for people with speech impairments.“It’s very exciting,” said Dr. Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in Mr. Harrell’s case but has developed different speech implants. A device that just years ago “seemed like science fiction,” he said, is now “improving, getting optimized, so quickly.”Mr. Harrell’s team sank into his brain’s outer layer four electrode arrays that looked like tiny beds of nails. That was double the number that had recently been implanted in the speech areas of someone with A.L.S., or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, in a separate study. Each array’s 64 spikes picked up electric impulses from neurons that fired when Mr. Harrell tried to move his mouth, lips, jaw and tongue to speak.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

N.I.H. officials suggested federal record keepers helped them hide emails. If so, “that’s really damaging to trust in all of government,” one expert said.House Republicans on Tuesday accused officials at the National Institutes of Health of orchestrating “a conspiracy at the highest levels” of the agency to hide public records related to the origins of the Covid pandemic. And the lawmakers promised to expand an investigation that has turned up emails in which senior health officials talked openly about trying to evade federal records laws.The latest accusations — coming days before a House panel publicly questions Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a former top N.I.H. official — represent one front of an intensifying push by lawmakers to link American research groups and the country’s premier medical research agency with the beginnings of the Covid pandemic.That push has so far yielded no evidence that American scientists or health officials had anything to do with the coronavirus outbreak. But the House panel, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, has released a series of private emails that suggest at least some N.I.H. officials deleted messages and tried to skirt public records laws in the face of scrutiny over the pandemic.Even those N.I.H. officials whose job it was to produce records under the Freedom of Information Act may have helped their colleagues avoid their obligations under that law, several emails suggest. The law, known as FOIA, gives people the right to obtain copies of federal records.“I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe,” Dr. David Morens, a former senior adviser to Dr. Fauci, wrote in February 2021. That email chain included Dr. Gerald Keusch, a scientist and former N.I.H. official, and Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a virus-hunting nonprofit group whose work with Chinese scientists has drawn scrutiny from lawmakers.“Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail,” Dr. Morens added, referring to his personal Gmail account.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The decision came after a scorching hearing in which lawmakers barraged EcoHealth Alliance’s president with claims of misrepresenting work with Chinese virologists.The Biden administration, under acute pressure from House lawmakers, moved on Wednesday to ban funding for a prominent virus-hunting nonprofit group whose work with Chinese scientists had put it at the heart of theories that Covid leaked from a lab.The decision, announced in a letter from the Department of Health and Human Services, came on the heels of a scorching congressional hearing this month at which lawmakers barraged the group’s president with suggestions that he had misrepresented work with virologists in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic began. Republicans went further, demanding that Peter Daszak, the president of the nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance, be criminally investigated.For EcoHealth, which relied on federal funding to study the threat of wild animal viruses, the loss of funding is another twist in a saga that has long dominated discussions of how the pandemic began.In April 2020, under orders from the Trump administration, the National Institutes of Health terminated a grant to EcoHealth amid President Donald J. Trump’s feud with China over the origin of the coronavirus. Three years later, an internal federal watchdog agency determined that the N.I.H. had failed to give a proper cause for ending the grant, which supplied an average of roughly $625,000 per year. The N.I.H. restarted a pared-back version of the award.Now, with Republicans stepping up their campaign against EcoHealth, and Democrats joining in the anger, the Biden administration has cut off funding for EcoHealth again.Health officials said they were suspending three active N.I.H. grants to EcoHealth that totaled $2.6 million for last year. And they proposed barring the group from receiving future federal research funding. Such bans, they said, usually last no more than three years, but could be longer or shorter.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The studies, pulled because of copied data, illustrate the sluggishness of scientific publishers to address serious errors, experts said.Scientists in a prominent cancer lab at Columbia University have now had four studies retracted and a stern note added to a fifth accusing it of “severe abuse of the scientific publishing system,” the latest fallout from research misconduct allegations recently leveled against several leading cancer scientists.A scientific sleuth in Britain last year uncovered discrepancies in data published by the Columbia lab, including the reuse of photos and other images across different papers. The New York Times reported last month that a medical journal in 2022 had quietly taken down a stomach cancer study by the researchers after an internal inquiry by the journal found ethics violations.Despite that study’s removal, the researchers — Dr. Sam Yoon, chief of a cancer surgery division at Columbia University’s medical center, and Changhwan Yoon, a more junior biologist there — continued publishing studies with suspicious data. Since 2008, the two scientists have collaborated with other researchers on 26 articles that the sleuth, Sholto David, publicly flagged for misrepresenting experiments’ results.One of those articles was retracted last month after The Times asked publishers about the allegations. In recent weeks, medical journals have retracted three additional studies, which described new strategies for treating cancers of the stomach, head and neck. Other labs had cited the articles in roughly 90 papers.A major scientific publisher also appended a blunt note to the article that it had originally taken down without explanation in 2022. “This reuse (and in part, misrepresentation) of data without appropriate attribution represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system,” it said.Still, those measures addressed only a small fraction of the lab’s suspect papers. Experts said the episode illustrated not only the extent of unreliable research by top labs, but also the tendency of scientific publishers to respond slowly, if at all, to significant problems once they are detected. As a result, other labs keep relying on questionable work as they pour federal research money into studies, allowing errors to accumulate in the scientific record.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Media accounts of a German man’s extreme vaccination history spurred researchers to analyze his immune responses.Two years ago, German doctors stumbled across news reports of a man being investigated for receiving scores of coronavirus vaccines with no medical explanation.Then followed a flurry of speculation about what he had been up to. As it turned out, prosecutors were looking into whether he had been receiving so many extra doses as part of a scheme to collect stamped immunization cards that he could later sell to people who wanted to skirt vaccine mandates.But to the doctors, the man was a medical anomaly, someone who had defied official recommendations and turned himself into a guinea pig for measuring the outer limits of an immune response. Last year, they asked prosecutors investigating his vaccine splurge to pass along a request: Would he like to join a research project?Once prosecutors closed their fraud investigation without criminal charges, the man agreed.By the time the doctors first saw him, the 62-year-old man had received 215 doses of coronavirus vaccine, they said. Flouting their pleas to stop, he received another two shots in the next months, expanding his immunological stockpile to a combined 217 doses of eight different Covid vaccine types over two and a half years.After months of studying him, the doctors, led by Dr. Kilian Schober, an immunologist at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in the German state of Bavaria, reported their findings this week in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, a medical journal.The man had seemingly never been infected with the coronavirus. He reported no vaccine side effects. And, most interestingly to the researchers, his repertoire of antibodies and immune cells was considerably larger than that of a typical vaccinated person, even if the precision of those immune responses remained effectively unchanged.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The stomach cancer study was shot through with suspicious data. Identical constellations of cells were said to depict separate experiments on wholly different biological lineages. Photos of tumor-stricken mice, used to show that a drug reduced cancer growth, had been featured in two previous papers describing other treatments.Problems with the study were severe enough that its publisher, after finding that the paper violated ethics guidelines, formally withdrew it within a few months of its publication in 2021. The study was then wiped from the internet, leaving behind a barren web page that said nothing about the reasons for its removal.As it turned out, the flawed study was part of a pattern. Since 2008, two of its authors — Dr. Sam S. Yoon, chief of a cancer surgery division at Columbia University’s medical center, and a more junior cancer biologist — have collaborated with a rotating cast of researchers on a combined 26 articles that a British scientific sleuth has publicly flagged for containing suspect data. A medical journal retracted one of them this month after inquiries from The New York Times.A Columbia University cancer surgeon, Dr. Sam S. Yoon, and a junior researcher have published a combined 26 articles that a data sleuth said contained irregularities.Marcus Santos/ZUMA Wire, AlamyMemorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where Dr. Yoon worked when much of the research was done, is now investigating the studies. Columbia’s medical center declined to comment on specific allegations, saying only that it reviews “any concerns about scientific integrity brought to our attention.”Dr. Yoon, who has said his research could lead to better cancer treatments, did not answer repeated questions. Attempts to speak to the other researcher, Changhwan Yoon, an associate research scientist at Columbia, were also unsuccessful.

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A British biologist and blogger discovered faulty data in many studies conducted by top executives of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.A prominent cancer center affiliated with Harvard said it will ask medical journals to retract six research papers and correct dozens of others after a British scientist and blogger found that work by some of its top executives was rife with duplicated or manipulated data.The center, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, one of the nation’s foremost cancer treatment and research facilities, moved quickly in recent days to address allegations of faulty data in 58 studies, many of them influential, compiled by a British molecular biologist, Sholto David.In many cases, Dr. David found, images in the papers had been stretched, obscured or spliced together in a way that suggested deliberate attempts to mislead readers. The studies he flagged included some published by Dana-Farber’s chief executive, Dr. Laurie Glimcher, and its chief operating officer, Dr. William Hahn.The retractions come as researchers in the United States face growing pressure to account for instances of scientific misconduct, sloppy work or outright fraud. Image sleuths have recently found evidence of fabricated data in scores of influential papers on Alzheimer’s disease. Last year, Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned as president of Stanford University after some of his published papers were found to contain manipulated results.Allegations of misconduct have ballooned in part because experts have access to new artificial intelligence tools that can flag suspicious images depicting experimental results.In the wake of recent high-profile misconduct claims, experts have drawn attention to a “publish or perish” culture in academia, which pressures researchers to generate striking results and place papers in major journals, whatever the merits of a study. Some researchers have also said that certain labs, explicitly or not, encourage junior researchers to take shortcuts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?