Last summer, I covered the saga of Harvard Business School’s Francesca Gino, who was credibly accused of flagrantly fabricating data in at least four of her published studies. She was caught when some data sleuths on the internet — investigating research misconduct in their free time — found discrepancies in the data for her papers and investigated further.

They eventually raised their concerns with Harvard, which investigated and ultimately requested retractions of the papers in question. (Gino filed a lawsuit against Harvard and the bloggers, accusing them of colluding to defame her.)

I kept thinking about Gino’s case as I read the uncannily similar story of a scandal at the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a leading cancer research hospital in Boston.

Dana-Farber was rocked this January by a blog post by Sholto David, a molecular biologist and internet data sleuth, in which he presented evidence of widespread data manipulation in cancer research published by leading researchers including the institute’s CEO and COO. David reportedly contacted the institute with concerns about 57 papers, 38 of which were ones for which the institute had “primary responsibility for the potential data errors.” The institute has requested retractions for 6 of them and initiated corrections for 31.

These data manipulations, to be clear, were not........

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