The [compliment from Doug Melton happened while I] was on a sabbatical in 2007. At the time, we were fighting somebody called Piero Anversa who claimed that you could repair the hearts with mesenchymal stromal cells or mesenchymal stem cells, he called them, and it was clearly not true, but he was publishing in Nature and Cell and all kinds of papers and we were fighting it and it was just purely an artifact. That was at the time I was giving those kinds of lectures, and Doug [Melton] was very supportive of that attempt.

Chuck Murry was of course doing the work and Irv Weissman and somebody called Loren Field. They were actually doing the experiments proving it was artifact. We did some as well, but it took 20 years, almost to the day, before his papers were withdrawn. They withdrew 30 papers.

He was at Valhalla and then at Beth Israel, I think it was. We would say, why can nobody reproduce your experiments? He said, not everybody can be Michelangelo.

He was a very good cardiologist, they say, but he was caught around 2017-2018. Papers were withdrawn. He had to pay $10 million back to NIH for ill-gained funds for grants, but it should have been hundreds of millions because he has wasted a lot of money, ruined a lot of careers. It was pure fraudulent data and I was asked often to review his papers for top journals and I pointed out every single time what was wrong with the data-

[His name is] Piero Anversa, and I pointed out every single time what was wrong with it, but the editors of the top journals, they just wanted it.

Oh, [it was cited] hundreds and hundreds of times. It put up the impact factor of these journals enormously. And in the end, I said I will not review any papers from him anymore because you don't listen to me. And there were others who said the same.

Dr. Christine Mummery is a professor of developmental biology at Leiden University and head of the Department of Anatomy and Embryology at the Leiden University Medical Center. Her work specializes in stem cell biology, cardiovascular development, and developmental biology.

In 1974, she received her Bachelor of Science degree in physics, electronics, and mathematics from the University of Nottingham, UK and in 1978 received her PhD in biophysics from the University of London, UK for her research at King’s College London. She received a post-doctoral fellowship at the Royal Society, UK from 1978 to 1980, and in 1981 continued her fellowship at the Hubrecht Institute working with carcinoma cells. In 1985, she was appointed to a tenured staff scientist working on developmental biology and differentiation.

In 2011, Dr. Mummery founded the iPSC&OoC Hotel facility in the Leiden University Medical Center. From 2009 to 20019, she was the head of the department of Anatomy and Embryology at Leiden University and guest professor at the University of Twente from 2015 to 2023. She was president of the ISSCR from 2020 to 2021 and is the founding editor of its journal, Stem Cell Reports.

Dr. Mummery has received several awards for her work in developmental biology, including the 2014 Hugo van de Poelgeest Prize for Animal Alternatives, the 2014 Hans Biomendaal Medal for innovative interdisciplinary research, being an elected member of the Academia Europaea in 2015 and Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010, the 2021 Fondation Lefoulon Delalande-Institut de France prize for cardiovascular physiology, and the ISSCR Public Service Award in 2023.