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VOICE OF EXPERIENCE: Robert Sprague always counsels potential whistleblowers to go through official channels before going public.
‘EXPLOSIVE DEVICE': Arthur Caplan cautions that media stories “have their own momentum.”
Scientific Whistleblowers Stress That The Media Are A Last Resort By: Billy Goodman | March 18, 1996
A Last Resort Those alleging misconduct agree with administrators that the optimal way to settle cases is through institutions, not the press.
(The Scientist, Vol:10, #6, p. 1 & 4, March 18, 1996)
Scientists do not agree on what misconduct is. They do not agree on how much of it occurs. Nor do they agree on what should be done about it. Yet scientists and
research administrators largely do concur that it would be better for all concerned-and for science itself-if the press never got involved in allegations of misconduct
except to report final outcomes.
Indeed, the Commission on Research Integrity (CRI)-a 12-member panel created by Congress in reaction to continuing misconduct in research and retaliation against
whistleblowers-omitted direct mention of the role of the press in its recently completed report (B. Goodman, The Scientist, Jan. 22, 1996, page 1). Indirectly,
panelists had the press at least partly in mind when they wrote, as part of the section of the report entitled “A Whistleblower’s Bill of Rights”: “Should a
whistleblower elect to make a lawful disclosure that violates institutional rules of confidentiality, the institution may thereafter legitimately limit the
whistleblower’s access to further information about the case.”
The theme behind that recommendation, and behind much of the report, is that scientists and their institutions are best equipped to respond appropriately to alleged
and actual scientific misconduct.
“I think scientific disputes should all be settled within the scientific community,” says biochemist and Lasker Award winner Don Wiley of Harvard University, whose
views are fairly typical of a small sample of scientific opinion. “You need scientists to make these decisions. Not to disparage journalists, but I don’t think that
scientific truth is their major concern.” Politics and personality, Wiley suggests, are what journalists are after.
Nicholas Wade, science editor at the New York Times and a veteran reporter on science-misconduct issues, begs to differ with Wiley. “Every community would prefer to
have its disputes settled behind closed doors,” says Wade, coauthor with William Broad of Defenders of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science (New York,
Simon and Schuster, 1982). “Many such disputes are of news interest, and that certainly includes scientific disputes. Journalists are every bit as interested in
scientific truth as scientists are. Journalists also see a legitimate story when scientists make personal attacks on each other, as they often do.”
Arthur Caplan, who directs the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, hears from scientists informally that someone with a misconduct complaint ought
to go through the appropriate institutional channels and be satisfied with the result, whether it is favorable or not. “No one says to give up after exhausting all
[institutional] channels, but some feel that way,” he observes. “The distrust of the press runs deep. Scientists see articles about things they know and come away
shaking their heads” over inaccuracies.
These views are not new. When Al Gore, as a congressman and chairman of the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the Committee on Science and Technology,
held hearings in 1981 on fraud in biomedical research, scientists told the subcommittee that fraud was rare and, when it did occur, was uncovered by normal procedures
of science. Many scientists still believe this. But today there is also a growing awareness among scientists of the need to do more. They realize that institutions,
including universities and scientific societies, must take an active role in reducing the occurrence of misconduct and in responding to it swiftly and justly. The
overwhelming message conveyed in interviews for this article with researchers and their administrators is that institutions now have procedures in place to deal with
misconduct-procedures that should be allowed to operate without unnecessary publicity.
The official most closely involved with the University of California, San Francisco’s handling of misconduct, associate vice chancellor for academic affairs Karl
Hittelman, does not speak favorably about the phenomenon of whistleblowers going to the press.
“It’s unfortunate, because it coopts the university process,” he says. “It is an expression of contempt for those processes and makes it impossible for anything but a
legal or public resolution of a case.”
But Hittelman, a CRI member, acknowledges that poor responses by universities to past misconduct
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PROCEDURE: Walter Stewart advises giving professional channels a chance to work.
RELUCTANT: Martog O’Toole says she would have preferred not to take her charges public.
a chance to work.” Suzanne Hadley, former NIH and congressional investigator of several high-profile misconduct cases, comments that “well-motivated scientists who are
aware of a problem want the problem to be fixed. The press are not able to fix the problem. They can shine a light on something and perhaps goose the system. The
honest whistleblower wants the system to work.
“In most instances, the whistleblower’s best interests are served by letting the process run its course, but only if the process is actually running,” she says. If it
is not, she adds, whistleblowers have the right to do whatever is legal, including making their allegations public.
Interviews with several scientists who have alleged misconduct and told their stories to journalists reveal that they spoke to the press only after becoming frustrated
with the slow pace of investigation within their institutions or NIH, or after such investigations wrongly-in their view-exonerated the alleged perpetrator of the
misconduct.
One scientist who reluctantly went public is Margot O’Toole, who has become a highly visible symbol of whistleblowing. As a postdoctoral scientist in 1986, O’Toole
disputed some data of Thereza Imanishi-Kari, then an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a case that has dragged on for a decade. The
incident concerned a paper coauthored by Nobelist David Baltimore that included the disputed data. The Office of Research Integrity (ORI) within the Public Health
Service found Imanishi-Kari guilty of misconduct in 1994, a ruling she has appealed. (A decision on that appeal is expected this spring.)
The dispute reached the media when Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) held hearings on the matter beginning in April 1988. Journalists picked up on the story, and O’Toole’s
name became well known to other scientists. Some wrote editorials supporting Baltimore and at least implicitly questioning O’Toole.
O’Toole, who is now a scientist at Cambridge, Mass.-based Genetics Institute Inc., says she would have preferred not to have become so visible. Early in the case she
had been urged to go to the press, but declined, she recalls.
“These were not matters easily judged by a reporter,” she notes, “but only by someone who could be given the data and was knowledgeable enough in the field to make a
judgment.”
But that wasn’t her only reason for not going to the press. “Certainly in the beginning, I had no desire at all to be public,” she remarks. “My goal was to have a
retraction with no stigma at all, with no public embarrassment at all.”
Today, most universities have-or profess to have-procedures to deal with misconduct allegations promptly. Having procedures in place and using them are not the same,
however.
CRI member Thomas Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project-a Washington, D.C.-based group that provides legal support for whistleblowers-
stresses that an institution’s leadership is the most important factor in having an open flow of communication and preventing reprisals against whistleblowers. If an
institution has working checks and balances against fraud and misconduct, Devine says, then it is better to work within the system and avoid forcing an
“institutionally defensive posture” that could result from disclosure in the press.
For Robert Sprague, institutional procedures-such as they were more than a decade ago-did not work. Sprague is a psychologist with the University of Illinois’
Institute for Research on Human Development, where he has been for 31 years. He brought a misconduct complaint against a collaborator and, after two years had passed
without resolution, he took his story to the press (R.L. Sprague, The Scientist, Dec. 14, 1987, page 11).
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sprague was studying the effects of certain drugs on mentally retarded patients and invited Stephen Breuning to collaborate with
him. Sprague was the principal investigator on the grant and Breuning-first at a residential facility in Michigan and then at the Western Psychiatric Institute of the
University of Pittsburgh-coordinated the work and gathered data from patients.
Sprague deduced that Breuning was not doing the research that he was publishing, and in December 1983 he informed his grant monitor at the National Institute of Mental
Health (NIMH). Shortly thereafter, the University of Pittsburgh investigated Breuning and decided there was nothing wrong with his work there. By late summer 1984,
NIMH began its own investigation. The first thing NIMH investigators did, says Sprague, was investigate him. “That made me angry,” he asserts.
By late 1985, with no report from NIMH in sight, Sprague did, as he puts it, what “you do in this country” when a wrong is not being righted and a coverup is feared:
He went to the press.
He maintains that he did not agonize much about taking his case to journalists. “I was beginning to smell a rat,” he says, “and it was pretty strong. [NIMH] investigated me first, talked to my employees, went through my files. That gave me a huge clue about what was going to happen. Then nothing happened for more than a
year, so if it was not a coverup, then they would drag it out until no
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‘UNFORTUNATE': Karl Hittelman calls public whistleblowing “an expression of contempt”.
Finally, Sprague talked to other journalists, including Daniel Greenberg of the newsletter Science and Government Report. Greenberg, who once wrote for Science, called
the magazine to ask what had become of the story. Prodded by competition, Science published a substantially similar story to the one it had been sitting on (C. Holden,
“NIMH review of fraud charge moves slowly,” 234:1488-9, Dec. 19, 1986). Twenty-three days later, three years after the initial charges, NIMH issued its first draft
report and on April 20, 1987, put out a final report finding against Breuning.
When his whistleblowing became public, Sprague says, he noticed a subtle tendency of colleagues to avoid him. And, shortly after the NIMH report came out, Sprague’s
NIMH grant renewal was rejected, even though he had been supported continuously for 17 years by the institute.
A year later, in 1988, Breuning became the first independent researcher in the United States to be indicted on research fraud, and ultimately pled guilty to two
charges of filing false reports.
Frequently contacted by would-be whistleblowers, Sprague counsels them to count the costs before they decide if they want to continue. He always advises them, he says,
to go through the chain of command at their universities or ORI. “I don’t have faith in that chain,” he says, “but it is incumbent on you to try the system. If it
doesn’t work, you have a much better case for going outside.”
Taking an allegation public by speaking to journalists is not as simple as it sounds. “It is difficult to get the press interested in these stories,” maintains
Stewart. “They are difficult and unrewarding.”
Marcel C. LaFollette, a research professor of science and technology policy at George Washington University, suggests another reason why some reporters may be
reluctant to pursue misconduct stories: Many science journalists, she says, depend on good relationships with scientists to help them get their stories; they do not
want to endanger those relationships. In her view, the press covers science as it covers other aspects of societyepisodically, going after specific cases as they
arise.
When a journalist does pursue a case, “you do whatever you can to verify that the whistleblower is telling the truth with respect to the facts,” maintains Culliton. It
is not enough, however, for the whistleblower to be honest. The story must be newsworthy, which for national science publications typically means that the people
involved are prominent or the alleged fraud may have a significant effect on patients or other researchers.
Penn’s Caplan advises would-be whistleblowers that once their story hits the press, “it’s an explosive device they can’t control. Stories have their own momentum. Once
you push a rock down a hill, it’s very difficult directing it.”
He tells whistleblowers that the price of going public will often be devastating to them personally. “To go public is to stand outside the community and be seen as a
snitch or a traitor, and that will have consequences,” he says. Whistleblowers need to “be prepared for a new line of employment.”
Another cost of going public may be the loss of legal protection for whistleblowers. Federal regulations protect whistleblowers acting in good faith, even if their
allegations prove false. Good-faith whistleblowers are not liable for defamation if sued by the accused. However, according to an ORI position paper (“The
Whistleblower’s Conditional Privilege to Report Allegations of Scientific Misconduct” December 1993), the Public Health Service misconduct regulation “does not condone
a whistleblower’s intentional public allegation of misconduct, such as disclosure to the media.”
In other words, blow the whistle in public and no whistleblower protections will be available at your defamation trial.
If a frustrated whistleblower with a verifiable allegation succeeds in stirring up press coverage, however, there are rewards. In Sprague’s case, he believes the
article in Science prompted NIMH to issue its long-delayed report on Stephen Breuning.
For Hadley, who has worked within the Public Health Service bureaucracy dealing with misconduct cases, press attention can be extremely helpful. “A front-page headline
focuses the mind,” she says. “If the bureaucracy has a number of cases and one is on the front page of the Washington Post, you know which will be dealt with
Billy Goodman, a freelance science writer based in Montclair, N.J., is online at goodmanb@styx.ios.com.
(The Scientist, Vol:10, #6, p. 1 & 4, March 18, 1996)
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