The federal government has issued sanctions against two former contract workers at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center who were accused of using their own blood in samples they were supposed to have taken from children. The collections were part of a study about blood levels of lead in American Indian children living near a former lead mine that is a Superfund clean-up site.

The federal Office of Research Integrity barred the two workers, Joy Bryant and Diana Layman, from working on federal research grants for the next three years, according to notices (here and here) in today’s Federal Register.

The project collected 335 blood samples from children 6 years old and younger. Of the samples, 10 to 15 were suspected of containing blood from the contract workers. The workers might have switched the samples because some children were frightened by the blood drawing, an investigation found. (Researchers later found that none of the samples, real or faked, had found abnormally high levels of lead.)

The allegations became public in November 2004, when the research project, the Tribal Effort Against Lead, ended. Officials at the health-sciences center, which ran the project with Emory University and Indian tribes in the area, offered to retest children who had given samples, the Tulsa World reported at the time. University officials also began requiring the blood draws to be performed in the presence of a witness. —Jeffrey Brainard