President of Karolinska Institutet cleared of misconduct charges

France’s Institut Pasteur’s ethical committee has cleared Karolinska Institutet’s President Ole Petter Ottersen from all suspicions of scientific misconduct, committee chairperson François Rougeon has announced on the conclusion of the investigation.

On 19 July this year Karolinska Institutet received a complaint of suspected scientific misconduct against its president, Ole Petter Ottersen. The complaint concerned a scientific paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience almost twenty years ago (1999), of which Professor Ottersen listed as co-author.

The case aroused considerable attention in the Swedish and Norwegian media, which connected it with the misconduct verdict that the President announced on 25 June 2018 concerning the so-called Macchiarini affair.

The research on which the Journal of Neuroscience article is based was not conducted at KI, which means that the matter cannot be investigated here. The complaint was therefore dismissed. KI contacted the research principal, the Institut Pasteur in Paris, to check if they had considered the article in question and found it to qualify as scientific misconduct.

On 5 September 2018, François Rougeon, chairperson of the Institut Pasteur’s ethical committee announced that, following a review of the data published in the article, the investigators found no grounds to bring a verdict of scientific misconduct:

”In our opinion, the analyses of the data does not support the allegation of scientific misconduct”.