The cancer drug, the faked data and the superstar scientist

Sydney Morning Herald

25-07-2025

On camera, Smyth looks nervous and drawn – a scientist out of water.
But in recorded lectures to scientific colleagues, he looks far more assured. Dressed in black with his gelled grey hair, answering technical questions off the cuff, he is a man in command.
'He was a little bit aloof, he had a high opinion of himself. He saw himself as an upper-level person. But he was a nice-enough fellow,' said Brett*, a former colleague who spent time with Smyth outside work and, like others, requested anonymity to avoid professional repercussions.
'His arrogance comes across very quickly,' said a second.
'He had an ab-fab reputation,' said a third, who would later be charged with investigating him.
'That, more than anything else, is the biggest puzzle of all to me. He was not trying to achieve that level of reputation – he'd already achieved it. Why did he feel it was necessary to try for even higher acclaim than he'd already got?'
From the outside, Smyth was a rising star, winning awards, publishing important papers, and being showered in millions of dollars of taxpayer research funding.
But inside his lab, from the earliest days of his career, concerns were emerging.
Selena*, who worked closely alongside Smyth during his time at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, said he only ever wanted to know the good news – even though science is littered with negative results.
He 'did not want to hear about things that weren't working. He wanted to see finished results. He did not want to know how it was being done,' she said.
'You'd present raw data, and he'd say, 'You can just leave those points out – they are outliers'.'
Other scientists sometimes could not reproduce his results. But rather than question Smyth, they often questioned themselves.
'Maybe he's got better hands than I have. Or maybe the mice are different,' said Brett*. 'There are all these variables.'
In 2004, Smyth was the senior author on a paper in top journal Nature Immunology, which was such a sensation that his co-author was nominated for a National Association of Research Fellows award, where Professor David Vaux was secretary.
Vaux, 65, is one of Australia's most important cancer researchers, past deputy director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute and winner of as many prizes as Smyth.
He is also one of the very few researchers willing to take on the scientific establishment when he believes someone is committing research misconduct.
A third thing to know about Vaux: when he goes to the doctor, he loves to read the Australian Women's Weekly. The puzzles where you have to spot differences between two images are his favourite.
Vaux had first come across Smyth in 1995 when he was asked to comment on a paper the young researcher submitted. He came across paragraphs that seemed similar to Vaux's own work. But when the paper was published, those paragraphs had disappeared. Still, Vaux kept half an eye on the rising star.
Years later, he found himself flicking through a 2004 paper Smyth had co-authored.
It contained rows of flow cytometry plots of immune cells. Each dot is meant to represent a cell.
'I just looked at them, fused the images, and it was immediately clear they had been duplicated and altered,' said Vaux.
The dot pattern kept repeating, as though someone had cut and pasted together the same images in a different order. Each plot contains 10,000 cells. 'The chances of two plots having the same pattern of dots would be 1 in 10 to the power of 1000.'
Vaux emailed the paper's authors.
'I can clearly see the problems – one dotplot has been duplicated and modified and used for at least 6 of the plots presented in that revised figure. I still haven't been able to track Mark down,' one wrote back. 'I feel sick.'
Nature Immunology launched an investigation and in 2006 retracted the paper because 'it contains a number of errors, including duplications of some flow cytometry plots'.
To this day, it is not clear if it was Smyth who duplicated the plots. But a retraction is an enormous black mark on a scientist's career.
Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre put in place compulsory research integrity training, including a seminar entitled 'Scientists Behaving Badly: Fraud & Misconduct'.
This was only the start of Smyth's troubles.
In 2014, a thin unmarked envelope was slipped under David Vaux's office door.
Inside, under a cover note from 'a concerned scientist', was a copy of a secret Peter Mac investigation into Mark Smyth.
The investigation started in 2012, when one of Smyth's PhD students was running a cancer experiment in mice. But the data wasn't good. It looked like another negative experiment.
Then, according to the student's evidence, Smyth provided him with a new spreadsheet. It contained records of 20 mice Smyth claimed he had kept as a 'side project'.
Smyth said he'd been running the same experiment – with better results. He suggested combining the data, making the results much more positive.
At Peter Mac, mice were tracked closely on its Mighty Mouse database, which recorded their births, deaths and every experiment.
The student could find no record of Smyth's additional mice on Mighty Mouse. He told Smyth, who suddenly advised tossing the new data.
Instead, the concerned student went to Peter Mac, which launched a preliminary investigation.
Smyth's personal lab book contained 'not entirely convincing' partial records for 14 of the mice, 'crowded into unlikely spaces', the preliminary investigative report, also obtained by this masthead, says.
A further six mice were recorded in a book belonging to a lab assistant.
But she told the inquiry she had no memory of monitoring the mice or writing the data in her lab book. She said the handwriting was not hers.
'The animal technicians are right on the ball. If they say a cage of mice, that they know Mark is talking about, never existed – it's not really possible,' one investigator told this masthead, speaking under condition of anonymity to detail confidential information.
Peter Mac's preliminary investigation found no independent evidence the mice ever existed and concluded Smyth had a case to answer.
'I thought it wasn't marginal,' said the investigator. 'I thought at the time: 'This guy is in serious trouble here'.'
But under an unusual arrangement, the University of Melbourne is responsible for conducting research misconduct investigations at Peter Mac. The sandstone institution would conduct the full investigation.
A finding he had made up mice could end Smyth's glittering career.
But Smyth's luck turned.
On the day of his hearing in front of an expert panel, a Peter Mac employee produced a new datasheet.
It was apparently written by Smyth and then 'mislaid'. The employee said they found it while clearing out his office.
It contained an error-riddled record for the 20 mice.
A handwriting expert brought in by the inquiry determined both this rediscovered loose sheet of paper and the records in the lab assistant's lab book – the ones she said she did not write – were likely written by the same person.
That person may have been Smyth, the panel was told. But the expert couldn't be sure.
Smyth claimed the central database that recorded mice was often faulty and not fit for purpose. Two of Smyth's colleagues told the panel they had similar problems with the database.
One of those colleagues was the person who found Smyth's 'mislaid' data sheet.
The other, Robert*, now says the panel misconstrued his evidence.
'When they asked me directly if the mice in question could have existed, I was very clear and responded with a 'no',' he said.
'It does haunt me that my statements have been twisted to allow Mark to escape punishment.'
The panel concluded Smyth did not make up the data. He was in the clear.
'It's very hard to understand how Melbourne University could say he wasn't fabricating the data, making it up, and then six or seven years later he's done exactly the same thing at QIMR,' Robert told this masthead.
'Melbourne University needs to take some accountability for allowing Mark to continue misleading scientists and patients.'
A senior Australian scientist with close knowledge of the case, speaking anonymously due to restrictions in their employment contract, is absolutely scathing.
'As they'd done with a number of integrity cases, [the University of Melbourne] … concluded there was nothing to see here,' they said.
'The institutional lens is: we have to avoid any suggestion the University of Melbourne has dodgy people, so let's find him not guilty and move him on.'
University of Melbourne deputy vice chancellor Professor Mark Cassidy said in a statement that all complaints and allegations were taken seriously and addressed in line with the appropriate guidelines.
GSK said its oncology research and development program was 'robust'.
'Our investigations of Nelistotug in combination with other therapies is always based on the full breadth of scientific evidence available,' it said.
Smyth was hired by QIMR in 2012, before the Peter Mac allegations were made, and left to join the Queensland-based institute in 2013 - before the investigation was concluded.
The allegations he faced soon became the subject of water-cooler gossip, both in Victoria and in Queensland.
'It was a pretty open secret at Peter Mac that Mark Smyth was fudging data,' said a former Peter Mac PhD student. 'No one believed it. It all looked fake.'
Smyth himself has never spoken publicly about the saga, he left QIMR and this masthead was not able to confirm where he was now working.
Approached recently at a house in a leafy Brisbane suburb a few minutes' drive from his former QIMR lab, he said he was 'not interested' in responding to the allegations, immediately turning down a printed list of questions as he unpacked golf clubs from his car.
'No thanks, I've been asked … a million times,' Smyth said.
Asked twice if he stood by his work and research, he said: 'Can you please just get away. I'm not interested. See you later.'