DNA Barcoding Expert Steven Newmaster Exposed As Fraud

In 2013, a team led by Steven Newmaster, a botanist at the University of Guelph (UG), took a hard look at popular herbal products such as echinacea, ginkgo biloba, and St. John’s wort, Charles Piller reported for Science.

Photo Insert: The major problems in the study by Newmaster and collaborators are missing, fraudulent, or plagiarized data that underpin (the papers) and his having recurrently failed to disclose competing financial interests.

The team published a study that used DNA barcoding—a system to identify species using small, unique snippets of genetic material—to test whether the bottles really contained what was printed on the label.

The results were troubling. Most of the tested products contained different plants, were larded with inert fillers, or were tainted with contaminants that could cause liver and colon damage, skin tumors, and other serious health problems.

The paper, published in BMC Medicine, received prominent attention from The New York Times, CBC, and many other media outlets. The findings “pissed me off,” Newmaster told PBS’s Frontline. “I go in to buy a product that I believe in, that I care about and I pay a lot of money for, and it’s not even in the bottle? Are you kidding me?”

But in an ironic twist, eight experts in DNA barcoding and related fields now charge that the 2013 paper that indicted an entire industry and launched a new phase in Newmaster’s career is itself a fraud.

In a 43-page allegation letter, sent to UG in June 2021 and obtained by Science, the researchers—from UG, the University of Toronto, the University of British Columbia, and Stanford University—cited major problems in the study and two others by Newmaster and collaborators.

“The data which underpin [the papers] are missing, fraudulent, or plagiarized,” the letter flatly stated. The group also charged that Newmaster “recurrently failed to disclose competing financial interests” in his papers.

The accusers include co-authors of two of the suspect papers, who now say they believe Newmaster misled them. “I felt that trust was betrayed,” says one of them, John Fryxell, executive director of the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario.

One paper, which compared the cost of DNA barcoding with traditional methods for cataloging forest biodiversity, was retracted last fall at the request of its junior author, Ken Thompson, now a Stanford postdoctoral fellow. The letter was also signed by evolutionary biologist Paul Hebert, sometimes called the “father of DNA barcoding,” who directs UG’s Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (CBG).

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