It greatly concerns us that the reputation of one of our faculty, cancer-vaccine researcher Nina Bhardwaj, was called publicly into question through your premature publication of fired researcher David O'Neill's allegations of research misconduct (Nature 467, 260; 2010), particularly as the New York University School of Medicine (NYU) was not then in a position to comment. The investigation by the NYU inquiry committee is now complete and Bhardwaj's reputation is restored.

The committee investigated each of O'Neill's allegations, reviewing relevant documents and drafts of manuscripts, interviewing the individuals involved, and engaging an outside expert statistician to review the allegations and documents. Neither the committee nor the independent expert found any credible evidence to support the allegations (for details, see http://go.nature.com/gxhfml).

Before O'Neill's employment was terminated (which was not in retaliation for reporting alleged misconduct as he said), the other co-authors of the manuscript about which he had complained convened to address his disagreement with the method of statistical analysis used. The dispute was resolved by including three different statistical methodologies in the manuscript, which reported on the outcome of an exploratory clinical trial. Each of these came to the same conclusion — namely, that the dendritic-cell vaccine developed by Bhardwaj is inferior to vaccine delivered by mineral-oil adjuvant.

The committee found no credible evidence that Bhardwaj was motivated, financially or otherwise, to “spin” the results of the trial to promote the dendritic-cell vaccine. Along with the independent expert, they concluded that the statistical tests were selected by the director of NYU's biostatistics division, not by Bhardwaj, and that the disagreement constituted a difference of opinion, not research misconduct. This difference arose because Bhardwaj and the other co-authors gave greater weight to the opinion of the statistical experts than to O'Neill on the matter of statistical method.

Bhardwaj's standing has therefore been upheld as a valued member of our faculty, as a committed mentor to junior faculty members and as a highly esteemed researcher in the cancer-vaccine field.