Next week, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is scheduled to begin trying a former City University of New York (CUNY) scientist for fraud related to his work on a failed drug for Alzheimer’s disease. But according to a 30 May, 2025 letter from the school made public in court records Tuesday, 14 October, 2025, CUNY has officially concluded that the researcher, Hoau-Yan Wang, did not engage in scientific misconduct. 

The letter is rife with ambiguity, however. It rejected a central misconduct finding made against Wang by CUNY’s own expert panel, and it suggests the school’s exoneration reflects the panel’s own "heightened evidentiary standard" for a data fabrication and fraud, beyond what CUNY actually mandates.

The investigative report, first reported by Science, "found evidence highly suggestive of deliberate scientific misconduct" in 14 cases. It also concluded that Wang had engaged in "long-standing and egregious misconduct in data management and record keeping" by discarding lab notebooks and raw data. That made it hard or impossible to definitively assess specific claims of image doctoring, the panel said. CUNY didn’t remove Wang from the faculty at the time or request that journals retract his work. Instead, it paid a law firm $1.25 million to find the source who leaked the report to Science.

Source https://www.science.org/content/article/his-fraud-trial-looms-alzheimer-s-scientist-exonerated-his-university-sort

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