In June, 2025, the lab of Gökhan Hotamışlıgil, a professor of genetics and metabolism at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, secured a $39 million dollar investment from İş Private Equity, an Istanbul-based firm. The partnership centers on FABP4, a protein associated with obesity and other metabolic conditions.

But over the past decades, two of Hotamışlıgil’s papers have been corrected for image duplications, and since the announcement, renewed scrutiny of Hotamışlıgil’s work appeared on PubPeer, including for issues with statistical analyses. The most recent comments are from Reese Richardson, a computational biologist who looks into scientific reproducibility.

In one PubPeer post, Richardson raised concerns about a 2017 paper in Nature Medicine in which he discovered mislabelling of data, claims of statistical significance the raw data didn’t seem to support, and some missing source data. Richardson also looked into a 2019 article in Cell Metabolism that contained "either wrongly reported or apparently manipulated" statistics.

Hotamışlıgil said the work for those two papers was led by Yu-Hua Tseng, another researcher at Harvard, and his group’s involvement was limited.

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2025/07/07/harvard-gokhan-hotamisligil-research-scrutiny-private-equity-turkey/

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