worked for CBG, but Thomas Braukmann,
a former postdoc at the center who’s now
at Stanford, says he saw him host tours of
CBG’s handsome atrium and sequencing labs
as if he ran the facility. “Those two buildings
are my buildings,” Newmaster said in a 2019
keynote speech at the CBD Expo, an industry
conference on cannabis in Orlando, Florida,
referencing the CBG complex. “I have 80 sci-
entists working for me.” That appears to be
a reference to CBG’s staff, who actually work
under Hebert.
In his biography on UG’s website,
Newmaster noted a postdoctoral fellowship
in “multidimensional matrix mathemat-
ics and multivariate analysis” at Australia’s
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial
Research Organisation, which says it has
no record of Newmaster. (The claim was
removed after Science asked Newmaster
about it in January.) His CV listed a presti-
gious Discovery grant from the Natural Sci-
ences and Engineering Research Council of
Canada (NSERC) for $198,000 over 5 years.
NSERC says the grant was $11,500 for 1 year.
He claimed a separate NSERC award for
$240,000, but it was only worth $40,000.
On its website, NHPRA listed many “stra-
tegic partners,” including the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration, U.S. Pharmacopeia,
the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the
Canadian National Research Council, and
the American Botanical Council. None has
any defined relationship with NHPRA,
they told Science. (In December 2021, after
Science contacted the groups, NHPRA’s web-
site was replaced with a notice that it would
be back in 2022.) In his 2019 cannabis speech,
Newmaster also claimed links with U.S.
regulators and standards boards that those
groups say don’t exist.
In one particularly odd boast during an
October 2020 radio interview, Newmaster
said he was working on SARS-CoV-2 tests,
in part at the request of the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in the
summer and fall of 2019, months before the
COVID-19 pandemic erupted. “In the scien-
tific community we were already sequencing
samples, blood samples, saliva samples, and
looking at this virus,” he told an incredulous
host. A CDC spokesperson could not locate
information about working with Newmaster.
His colleagues complained of other kinds
of dishonesty, too. In 2010, several UG scien-
tists say, a student reported that Newmaster
had taken large portions of his course ma-
terials from internet sites. “I was absolutely
floored,” says Wright, who co-taught that
course with him. Science obtained a sample
of the documents and verified substantial
copying and pasting from Wikipedia and
elsewhere. When Wright confronted him,
Newmaster seemed unperturbed, she says: “ISCIENCE science.org 4 FEBRUARY 2022 • VOL 375 ISSUE 6580 487GRAPHICS: (TOP TO BOTTOM F. WEI
ET AL
., J. AGRIC. FOOD CHEM
.,^60
: 10118 (2012; J. YUK
ET AL., ANAL. BIOANAL. CHEM.
,^405
: 4499 (2013; GGFORTIFY AUTHORS/CRAN.R PROJECT.ORG
“Unique signatures”
In his talk, Newmaster
described how “unique
signatures” helped
his team identify
coffee cultivars from
Guatemala, Colombia,
Tanzania, and Brazil.
But the image he
showed was identical
to one in a paper about
coffee identification
published in the
Journal of Agricultural
and Food Chemistry by
a Japanese research
group in 2012.Bad chemistry
This graphic, which
Newmaster said
showed data from
his work on cannabis
identification, is
identical—including
the added numbers
and text along
the axes—to one
in a paper about
identifying ginseng
types, published
in Analytical and
Bioanalytical
Chemistry by a
different research
group in 2012.Into the weeds
Newmaster said this
slide showed nuclear
magnetic resonance
profiles for three
cannabis strains; he
added photos of
each (circled here).
But the graphic is
identical to one showing
arrest data for 50 U.S.
states that appears
on the Comprehensive
R Archive Network,
a support site for
the programming
language R.Uncanny resemblance
During a 2020 online training for the Association of Food and Drug Officials about
cannabis cultivar identification and purity verification, Steven Newmaster presented data
from other researchers—and even from completely different fields—as his own.