Ranjit Chandra

Ranjit Kumar Chandra (रंजीत कुमार चंद्रा; born February 2, 1938) is an Indian-born Canadian researcher and self-proclaimed "father of nutritional immunology" who committed scientific and health care fraud. Chandra's misconduct was the subject of a 2006 documentary by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). A libel trial in July 2015, concluded that the allegations of fraud against Chandra were truthful; he was ordered to pay $1.6 million to cover CBC's legal fees, and later that year was stripped of his membership in the Order of Canada. As of 2020, four of Chandra's research publications have been retracted, and one has been corrected.

In 2016, the Ontario Provincial Police issued a warrant for Chandra's arrest, based on a criminal charge of fraud exceeding $5,000 for having allegedly defrauded the Ontario Health Insurance Plan.

Scientific fraud

In the late 1980s, Chandra was hired by Ross Laboratories, US manufacturer of Isomil and Similac, to determine if their infant formulas could help babies avoid allergy problems; Nestlé (Good Start) and Mead Johnson had also contracted with Chandra for similar studies on their infant formulas. Chandra reported that the Nestlé and Mead Johnson formulas could protect infants from allergies, but the Ross formula could not, despite nearly identical ingredients in the three studied formulas. Marilyn Harvey, a nurse who recruited subjects for Chandra's studies and who disputed the accuracy of the number of infants reportedly enrolled in those studies, stated, "[Chandra] had all of the data analyzed and published even before we had [...] the data collected." In explaining his suspicious results to Mark Masor, then clinical research associate for Ross Pharmaceuticals, Chandra allegedly stated that "the study really wasn't designed right," although he had designed the studies himself, and he also claimed "you didn't really pay me enough money to do it correctly."

In 1994, Memorial University, at which Chandra was a professor, investigated him for research fraud but its findings were kept private.

In 2001, a study by Chandra and published in the journal Nutrition claimed that his own, patented multivitamin mineral supplement — the rights to which had been licensed to Javaan Corporation, a company founded by his daughter Amrita Chandra Gagnon — could reverse memory problems in people over the age of 65. The same study had earlier been submitted to, and rejected by, the British Medical Journal (BMJ), following a review by an expert who reported that the study had "all the hallmarks of being entirely invented." In response to questions raised about the paper's validity, including questions of whether any of the reported work had actually been performed, Nutrition published an editorial that stated, "We regret that our peer review process failed to identify these problems before publication." Officials at Memorial University, where Chandra had been a faculty member and where the study was allegedly conducted, were requested to investigate but did not, stating that the combination of Chandra's retirement, his having left the country, and his claim that all the raw data had been lost during an office move prevented an investigation.