An ecologist who shot to fame after discovering that spiders have human-like personalities has made an emotional apology after being found guilty of sexing-up research data and losing his £120,000-a-year job.
Professor Jonathan Pruitt has been at the centre of an international scandal since 2020 when it emerged that some of his radical findings had been falsified.
He was the first person to show that certain types of arachnids share similar behavioural traits to humans, and that these personalities determine the roles individual spiders play in their colony.
Boffins already knew that larger animals like cats and dogs had distinct personalities, but Pruitt’s revelations led him to be idolised by the academic community for his “truly significant” contribution to science.
The findings, which were seen as an historic breakthrough in our understanding of evolution and life on earth, were published in more than 170 journals worldwide and were funded by the US and Canadian governments.
But his career and reputation were left in tatters earlier this year after he was exposed for falsifying results in multiple papers.
A three-year investigation by McMaster University in Canada, dubbed #PruittGate on social media, concluded that he was guilty of misconduct after engaging in “data falsification and fabrication” in several studies between 2013 and 2016.
The university also found that American-born Pruitt, who was Associate Professor of Behavioural Ecology at the time, had failed to keep adequate and accurate records, thereby preventing peers from verifying and replicating his work.
Pruitt’s spectacular fall from grace ranks among the highest-profile scandals in modern science history.
Pruitt, known as ‘Spiderman’ in scientific circles, was sacked from his £120,000-a-year job and 16 of his papers have since been retracted.
Only two other cases of academic fraud are said to have caused the scientific community so much harm and led to such controversy.
Both involved ambitious young scientists who, like Pruitt, were thought of as rising stars destined for a Nobel prize.
Pruitt, 37, now teaches high school biology and supplements his income by writing fantasy novels.
In a post published on his website, ‘TheShadowsOfTheMonolith.com’, Pruitt apologised to his colleagues, to the science journals, and to the wider public for the first time.
Whilst his discoveries were real and continue to be cited by other scientists, they have been undermined by his actions, which he admitted “fell well short” of professional and ethical standards and resulted in him paying the price by losing his livelihood.
He wrote: “I deeply regret the serious harm that the data irregularities and time-keeping oversights in my research has caused.
“Scientists should be held to the highest standards of integrity, and I fell well short of those standards, destroying my academic career in the process.
“The fact that so much time was spent on the investigation, and so many people were impacted directly or indirectly, materially, or not, has troubled me every day for the past three years.
“These types of data irregularities, whether intentional or otherwise, shake the public’s trust in science and for that I apologise wholeheartedly to all concerned.”
Pruitt authored and co-authored numerous studies into biological dystopias and the unexplained collapses of social spider colonies.
He found that environmental pressures such as hurricanes quicken the evolutionary process by favouring the survival of bold spiders over their more docile counterparts, creating stronger and more aggressive cobweb and velvet spiders which are better equipped to deal with extreme weather events.
He also provided the first evidence that individual spiders in the wild will sacrifice their own reproduction for the sake of the colony to avoid societal collapse – a hotly debated topic in biology for 40 years.
But some of Pruitt’s studies were called into question in January 2020 when a co-author of three papers raised concerns about possible data duplication.
His experiments into aggression involved gently tapping or blowing puffs of air on a web full of spiders to frighten them, and timing how long it took for individuals to recover their composure and uncurl from their defensive ball.
He should have recorded each of the spiders’ recovery times but was found to have added some of the same results more than once in experiments.
Similar anomalies were subsequently found in other papers co-authored by Pruitt.
It is understood that the errors did not affect the outcome of the studies, which were published between 2013 and 2016 when Pruitt worked at the University of Pittsburgh and, later, at the University of California Santa Barbara.
But a retrospective investigation by McMaster University, which Pruitt joined as Associate Professor of Behavioural Ecology in 2018, found that the duplication constituted a breach of its Research Integrity Policy and amounted to “fabrication and falsification”.
Its Hearings Committee concluded in May this year that Pruitt “.. generally failed to meet the
requirements expected of a tenured professor under the Policy when conducting research” in eight of the 12 papers it investigated.
Pruitt, who was suspended pending the outcome of the investigation, was also ruled to have kept inaccurate time-keeping records in these papers.
Of the 176 papers he published, 16 have since been retracted from science journals.
Pruitt, whose research was funded by the Canadian and US governments, resigned from McMaster University in July 2022.
He also stepped down from the ‘Canada 150 Research Chair’, a prestigious Canadian Government-backed program to boost the country’s scientific credentials.
The backlash was so fierce that Pruitt, who is single, now works as a USD$66,000-a-year biology teacher at a high school in Florida and writes satirical dark fantasy novels as ‘Jonathan N. Pruitt’.
His debut novel, The Amber Menhir (Book One of The Shadows of the Monolith) was released in September through Spinner Loom Press and has already become an Amazon bestseller.
He has not spoken publicly about the accusations, which have tarnished his legitimate scientific discoveries, until now.
On his blog, he said: “McMaster had to decide on the balance of probabilities whether these data duplications were deliberate, and they reached the conclusion that in eight papers they were.
“I don’t fault this because what I needed for my defence was a detailed explanation of how these ‘copy and paste’ events could have happened procedurally, again and again, and I wasn’t able to provide that.
“If I could have explained it adequately then I wouldn’t have been found guilty.
“In my defence, only some two per cent of the total data was contaminated, and removing it didn’t change the results of the studies, but that’s a numeric defence and it doesn’t mean that trust is restored. The fact that they ever occurred at all depletes the trust the public had in those works.”
He added: “And as I have always said, I did not duplicate data intentionally. If I was going to do that, I would do so to change the results and that was not what was found.
“However, I fully appreciate that the anomalies were there and take full responsibility for them being there.
“If you can’t trust scientists to be dispassionate and rigorous – if you’re not checking every value within your own datasheet – then you’re not really doing your job and for this I have lost everything.”