A Harvard Medical School professor plagiarized huge swaths of a report he submitted on carcinogenic chemicals, according to a federal judge, who agreed to remove it as evidence in a class action case against Lockheed Martin.
Assistant professor Dipak Panigrahy had sent in a 500-page report on behalf of the plaintiffs, who have accused the weapons manufacturer of releasing toxic chemicals from its Orlando, Florida facility, causing them to get sick, The Harvard Crimson first reported.
On March 18, US District Court Judge Roy Dalton Jr. granted a motion to toss out Panigrahy’s report as evidence and said the professor, in his report, largely plagiarized from work by the International Agency for Research on Cancer [IARC].
“Dr. Panigrahy’s report is — put plainly — a mess,” Dalton wrote in the motion. “Indeed, the plagiarism is so ubiquitous throughout the report that it is frankly overwhelming to try to make heads or tails of just what is Dr. Panigrahy’s own work.”
The Post has reached out to Dr. Panigrahy and Harvard University for comment.
Panigrahy told Fox News that the court made “clear factual errors” and he expects the ruling to be reversed on appeal.
The professor said that he had correctly cited the reports and articles the judge said were plagiarized. The initial report included 1107 references, he said, plus a supplemental report with an additional 338 references.
“As I made clear in my reports and my deposition, I relied on IARC reviews for their comprehensive discussion of the available literature and study results, and then conducted my own analysis based on the body of available evidence,” Panigrahy said.
“The Court ignored this, or did not understand this, and heedlessly accepted the defendants’ mischaracterization of my work. We expect the Judge’s order to be overturned,” he added.
However, Dalton said that the plagiarism appeared to be “deliberate” and that the professor repeatedly “outright refused” to acknowledge that large portions of the report quote other works verbatim without a quote or citation.
“The volume of references actually makes the problems with Dr. Panigrahy’s methodology more glaring, as he admitted that he did not even read the 1,100 papers in their entirety,” the judge said.
“In sum, the rampant plagiarism in Dr. Panigrahy’s report leads the Court to conclude that his general causation methodology as a whole is too unreliable to put before a jury,” Dalton continued.
In January, Harvard’s former president Claudine Gay resigned in disgrace after she was accused of plagiarizing others’ works.
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