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A biotechnology entrepreneur who is facing high-profile charges of insider trading on the US stock market was repeatedly fired for suspected misconduct during his research career, according to allegations published by The Wall Street Journal.

A front-page story in the US newspaper on 27 September claims that Samuel Waksal, the former chief of biotech firm ImClone Systems in New York, was dismissed over questions of misconduct on four occasions in the 1970s and 1980s. Each time he quickly landed another research job at a prestigious institution, the story says. Scott Tagliarino, a spokesman for Waksal at Rubenstein Associates in New York, says that Waksal had no comment to make on the allegations.

But if true, the story highlights the difficulties faced by US institutions in trying to police scientific misconduct. University lawyers often prohibit faculty members from telling a suspect's prospective new employer that a misconduct investigation is under way, experts in scientific conduct say. And even if a scientist is found guilty, the university may keep quiet to avoid being sued for libel, says David Goodstein, a physicist and vice-provost of the California Institute of Technology who developed its policy on scientific misconduct.

Waksal is currently under investigation for allegedly informing friends, including homemaking celebrity Martha Stewart, of the impending rejection by federal regulators of ImClone's star cancer drug Erbitux, allowing them to cash out their stock.

According to the Journal article, he was ejected from a lab at Stanford University in 1974 on suspicion of lying about obtaining certain reagents. His employer at the time, biologist Leonard Herzenberg, confirmed this account in an interview on 30 September, adding that he told Waksal's next employer of his concerns by telephone with Waksal on the line — but that Waksal denied having lied and the warning went unheeded. “He was a real charmer,” Herzenberger says. “He charmed everybody; people believed him.”

But the problems continued, the Journal alleges. Waksal lost subsequent positions amid concerns about misconduct, it says, at the National Cancer Institute in 1977, at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston in 1982, and at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York in 1985 — the year he founded ImClone. Henry Wortis, who collaborated with Waksal at Tufts, told Nature that he heard about the allegations of misconduct from several colleagues during the 1980s, after Waksal failed to deliver materials promised in a collaboration.