10 ms·

Professor admits faking AIDS vaccine to get $19M in grants

101 points by lmg643 13y ago

throwaway_yy2Di 13y ago
"Han agreed last month not to seek government contracts for three years, the register said." Something's missing from the story. He committed major fraud in a federal grant: where're the felony charges? People spend years in prison for this type of crime (e.g. [0-2]); so, something's off. The Federal Register notice the OP is citing is probably this one: [3]. [0] http://www.albany.edu/~scifraud/data/sci_fraud_4952.html http://www.albany.edu/~scifraud/data/sci_fraud_4952.html [1] http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2011/November/11-crm-1547.html http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2011/November/11-crm-1547.html (hey that's Carmen Ortiz!) [2] http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2012/11/ex-psu_prof_craig_grimes_sente.html http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2012/11/ex-psu_pr... [3] https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2013/12/23/2013-30424/findings-of-research-misconduct https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2013/12/23/2013-304...
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  I agree, this seems like it should be heavily prosecuted. This sort of misbehavior and subsequent lack of serious enforcement is just grist to the mill of people who want to cut scientific funding across the board, claim climate change is a hoax by grant-chasing scientists etc.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - dnautics 13y ago
    think of it this way, though: the taxpayer is forced to pay for this. Before you say, 'but basic science wouldn't be funded otherwise', consider Janelia Farms, or Glyn Research Ltd (which discovered the chemiosmotic effect and got the nobel prize), which are/were funded privately; and if they commit fraud then only the donors are left holding the bag - a risk they know to be taking when they make their donation. As for prosecution, the agreement to get only three years is awful; Consider Leo Paquette - who kaiboshed a grant idea in (secret) committee and subsequently stole it - and got a 5 year suspension of grants. This was an affront to the rules of granting, not science itself; and yet got a harsher pushishment; shows where the priorities of the authorities lie.
    - jjoonathan 13y ago
      > the taxpayer is forced to pay for this Are you suggesting that science would advance at a comparable pace with only private funding? Why do you point to a single example (remember, there are several Nobel prizes given every year) as if it proves that it would? Alternatively, do you think publicly funded science doesn't produce useful results? Remember that the market automatically assigns a value of $0 to almost every useful research result due to the fact that they are not effectively excludable -- you can't use a university's (or lab's) income statement to judge value creation. > the agreement to get only three years is awful As with all punishments, the official sentence is only the beginning. He has been fired from his position and given the insanely competitive environment in the biosciences (often hundreds of applicants for a single professorship), he will almost certainly never find professorial work again.
      - maxharris 13y ago
        Are you suggesting that science would advance at a comparable pace with only private funding? Maybe he's not saying that. But I worked in a government-funded research lab for two years, and I have no choice but to say it: science would advance faster if it were privately funded.
        tensor 13y ago
        Given the number of papers I've read from industry, I doubt we'd have anything resembling science without public funding. Some private engineering perhaps, but not science.
        thaumasiotes 13y ago
        The governments of yore were truly visionary, to provide public funding for science before the concept even existed.
        dnautics 13y ago
        Counterexamples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell http://www.janelia.org/ http://www.janelia.org/
  - 001sky 13y ago
    Why isn't this considered "grant piracy" and this guy charged with wire-fraud by the feds? Surely he mis-used the postal service, banking system, and inter-state commerce in here somewhere? Why not a conspiracy under RICO? there seem to be all kinds of ways to send a better message than...please wait three years to attempt your next crime!
    - sillysaurus2 13y ago
      Laws aren't meant to be weapons to be used against those we hate. If he committed a crime, then let his actual crime be the crime we charge him with. Laws against wire fraud protect people from a certain kind of malicious behavior which wasn't exhibited here. Going down the route of "find crimes to charge him with" is a bad idea for many reasons, one being: if it becomes commonplace to bend the spirit of laws just to send a message, then that will make the already-too-powerful courts even moreso.
      - CharlieA 13y ago
        I agree with your premise that the spirit of a law shouldn't be violated to send a message but I don't see that it applies here. For me this doesn't pass the sense test: should a person be able to knowingly, intentionally fake the results of a scientific experiment in order to secure a grant of taxpayer money? No. No more than you should be able to fake the 'results' of your yearly income, say, for the purpose of receiving welfare.
        talmand 13y ago
        I don't believe the comment was to not charge the guy with anything, it was not to charge him with more than necessary to punish him for the crime he actually did commit.
      - JackFr 13y ago
        IANAL, but my understanding is that wire fraud is specifically used to give federal prosecutors standing in a case they might not otherwise have jurisdiction to prosecute. That is is a fraud took place entirely within one state, it would be a state affair, and there would be no federal crime -- unless they used either the mail or a national telecommunications network to facilitate the fraud. However, in this case since the target was a federal agency, presumably it is a federal crime already. More interesting I would think is that even if the US attorney doesn't want to press charges, I'm sure the AG of Iowa (and possibly Maryland) could.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
swombat 13y ago
Not sure exactly how a smart person can choose to do something that's so obviously going to get him caught and ruin his career. Lying about something as highly visible as an AIDS vaccine seems just plain stupid, whatever the ethics of it may be...
- DanBC 13y ago
  Smart people do dumb or evil things all the time. There was a submission to HN a while ago about someone who went to jail for fraud. But to get to that point he needed a lot of other people to help him or to turn away. He didn't need any clever manipulation. He just asked them. And each of them complied, knowing that what they were doing was wrong.
- dnautics 13y ago
  perhaps he thought that there might be a kernel of truth there that, even if his first data set didn't work, could be turned into something real.
- daemonk 13y ago
  Reproducibility is a big problem in biology right now. He probably thought he could delay people finding out until he can produce good legitimate research that might distract attention away from the faked data. I was thinking, "please don't be Chinese" when I read the title. Fuck.
  - D9u 13y ago
    I was under the impression that the name Dong-Pyou Han was of Korean origin?
    - icegreentea 13y ago
      Han is a valid Chinese and Korean last name. However, this researcher appears to be Chinese based on his previous publication history (he was affiliated with a university in Shanghai prior to coming to the states which is unlikely occurrence for a Korean)
ChuckMcM 13y ago
"Han agreed last month not to seek government contracts for three years, the register said." Hmmm, well if you're caught faking your science how do you ever get a job again where you can apply for a grant? One would hope he would switch professions at this point.
- breadtk 13y ago
  Perhaps he will spend the next three years studying for a new field?
- jmpeax 13y ago
  Hopefully the people reviewing his grants in three years time will remember him.
a_olt 13y ago
Besides the issue of his seemingly trivial prosecution that others posters have noted, I also wonder what he spent the grant on, or planned to?
- tensor 13y ago
  Unless science funding is different in the US, and as far as I know it is not, he cannot spend it on personal things. The worst he could do is buy himself some computers "for research" then use them for only for personal use, or give them to family. Purchases still need to go through the university. Sometimes grant money even has restrictions on this, e.g. it can be used only for students. He most likely did this to get more resources for research work. E.g. it was motivated by a desire for fame and status.
  - Fomite 13y ago
    Yeah, this is likely much less about "stuff" as much as keeping an active lab going, securing tenure, bright, big publications etc.
  - ssmoot 13y ago
    Reading the thread sibling responses, it seems plausible you could get around that? (I'm just a lay-person.) I mean, you pay the University $XX for "misc facilities and support". That goes into the school's fund. Later, the Dean gives you a "completely unrelated and coincidental" Xmas bonus of $X. Also out of the school's fund. It's not grant money at that point. It's from a general discretionary fund that just happens to get deposits for services provided to grant based science. So... money laundering basically I guess?
- discardorama 13y ago
  Having worked at a university research lab in the US, let me tell you that the situation isn't as clean as most people believe. When you apply for a grant, you add an "overhead" amount, which is specified as a percentage of the grant. A typical number is 50%: if you want $X for your lab, you apply for $X * 1.5, with the reasoning that the extra 50% is for the university to provide you with facilities, tuition wavers for your students, computer support, etc. So far, so good. What many people don't know is that of that 50% that the university collects, about 20% (actual figure can vary a lot) comes to the Dean's slush fund (so, about 10% of the grant itself using above figures). The Dean can use this money to give young faculty starter research grants; but more often, the Dean can use this money to dole out discretionary bonuses (which can be very large) to the top research faculty. So if the grantee gets a $19MM grant, you can bet that he's making 100s of 1000s of dollars in bonuses from the Dean. Anyways, the system is quite messy if you take a closer look...
001sky 13y ago
The falsified results prompted more funding for the vaccine effort. But, of course... ;D http://www.kcci.com/news/central-iowa/isu-researcher-admits-to-faking-aids-research-resigns/-/9357080/23630668/-/v96wr/-/index.html?absolute=true http://www.kcci.com/news/central-iowa/isu-researcher-admits-...
auvrw 13y ago
one summer in college, i had a research-y project at a respected state school (which shall remain nameless except to say not a UC), wherein one of the program organizers publicly admitted to falsifying data. now this wasn't data that anyone was going to look at too carefully, and the justification was that it would get aid for some noble cause in need (although apparently not as in need as the prof. thought it ought to be), but... c'mon, "scientists," don't just start lying to people.

101 points by lmg643 13y ago

"Han agreed last month not to seek government contracts for three years, the register said." Something's missing from the story. He committed major fraud in a federal grant: where're the felony charges? People spend years in prison for this type of crime (e.g. [0-2]); so, something's off. The Federal Register notice the OP is citing is probably this one: [3]. [0] http://www.albany.edu/~scifraud/data/sci_fraud_4952.html http://www.albany.edu/~scifraud/data/sci_fraud_4952.html [1] http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2011/November/11-crm-1547.html http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2011/November/11-crm-1547.html (hey that's Carmen Ortiz!) [2] http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2012/11/ex-psu_prof_craig_grimes_sente.html http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2012/11/ex-psu_pr... [3] https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2013/12/23/2013-30424/findings-of-research-misconduct https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2013/12/23/2013-304...

anigbrowl 13y ago
I agree, this seems like it should be heavily prosecuted. This sort of misbehavior and subsequent lack of serious enforcement is just grist to the mill of people who want to cut scientific funding across the board, claim climate change is a hoax by grant-chasing scientists etc.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- dnautics 13y ago
  think of it this way, though: the taxpayer is forced to pay for this. Before you say, 'but basic science wouldn't be funded otherwise', consider Janelia Farms, or Glyn Research Ltd (which discovered the chemiosmotic effect and got the nobel prize), which are/were funded privately; and if they commit fraud then only the donors are left holding the bag - a risk they know to be taking when they make their donation. As for prosecution, the agreement to get only three years is awful; Consider Leo Paquette - who kaiboshed a grant idea in (secret) committee and subsequently stole it - and got a 5 year suspension of grants. This was an affront to the rules of granting, not science itself; and yet got a harsher pushishment; shows where the priorities of the authorities lie.
  - jjoonathan 13y ago
    > the taxpayer is forced to pay for this Are you suggesting that science would advance at a comparable pace with only private funding? Why do you point to a single example (remember, there are several Nobel prizes given every year) as if it proves that it would? Alternatively, do you think publicly funded science doesn't produce useful results? Remember that the market automatically assigns a value of $0 to almost every useful research result due to the fact that they are not effectively excludable -- you can't use a university's (or lab's) income statement to judge value creation. > the agreement to get only three years is awful As with all punishments, the official sentence is only the beginning. He has been fired from his position and given the insanely competitive environment in the biosciences (often hundreds of applicants for a single professorship), he will almost certainly never find professorial work again.
    - maxharris 13y ago
      Are you suggesting that science would advance at a comparable pace with only private funding? Maybe he's not saying that. But I worked in a government-funded research lab for two years, and I have no choice but to say it: science would advance faster if it were privately funded.
      - tensor 13y ago
        Given the number of papers I've read from industry, I doubt we'd have anything resembling science without public funding. Some private engineering perhaps, but not science.
        thaumasiotes 13y ago
        The governments of yore were truly visionary, to provide public funding for science before the concept even existed.
        dnautics 13y ago
        Counterexamples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell http://www.janelia.org/ http://www.janelia.org/
- 001sky 13y ago
  Why isn't this considered "grant piracy" and this guy charged with wire-fraud by the feds? Surely he mis-used the postal service, banking system, and inter-state commerce in here somewhere? Why not a conspiracy under RICO? there seem to be all kinds of ways to send a better message than...please wait three years to attempt your next crime!
  - sillysaurus2 13y ago
    Laws aren't meant to be weapons to be used against those we hate. If he committed a crime, then let his actual crime be the crime we charge him with. Laws against wire fraud protect people from a certain kind of malicious behavior which wasn't exhibited here. Going down the route of "find crimes to charge him with" is a bad idea for many reasons, one being: if it becomes commonplace to bend the spirit of laws just to send a message, then that will make the already-too-powerful courts even moreso.
    - CharlieA 13y ago
      I agree with your premise that the spirit of a law shouldn't be violated to send a message but I don't see that it applies here. For me this doesn't pass the sense test: should a person be able to knowingly, intentionally fake the results of a scientific experiment in order to secure a grant of taxpayer money? No. No more than you should be able to fake the 'results' of your yearly income, say, for the purpose of receiving welfare.
      - talmand 13y ago
        I don't believe the comment was to not charge the guy with anything, it was not to charge him with more than necessary to punish him for the crime he actually did commit.
    - JackFr 13y ago
      IANAL, but my understanding is that wire fraud is specifically used to give federal prosecutors standing in a case they might not otherwise have jurisdiction to prosecute. That is is a fraud took place entirely within one state, it would be a state affair, and there would be no federal crime -- unless they used either the mail or a national telecommunications network to facilitate the fraud. However, in this case since the target was a federal agency, presumably it is a federal crime already. More interesting I would think is that even if the US attorney doesn't want to press charges, I'm sure the AG of Iowa (and possibly Maryland) could.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

swombat 13y ago

Not sure exactly how a smart person can choose to do something that's so obviously going to get him caught and ruin his career. Lying about something as highly visible as an AIDS vaccine seems just plain stupid, whatever the ethics of it may be...

DanBC 13y ago
Smart people do dumb or evil things all the time. There was a submission to HN a while ago about someone who went to jail for fraud. But to get to that point he needed a lot of other people to help him or to turn away. He didn't need any clever manipulation. He just asked them. And each of them complied, knowing that what they were doing was wrong.
dnautics 13y ago
perhaps he thought that there might be a kernel of truth there that, even if his first data set didn't work, could be turned into something real.
daemonk 13y ago
Reproducibility is a big problem in biology right now. He probably thought he could delay people finding out until he can produce good legitimate research that might distract attention away from the faked data. I was thinking, "please don't be Chinese" when I read the title. Fuck.
- D9u 13y ago
  I was under the impression that the name Dong-Pyou Han was of Korean origin?
  - icegreentea 13y ago
    Han is a valid Chinese and Korean last name. However, this researcher appears to be Chinese based on his previous publication history (he was affiliated with a university in Shanghai prior to coming to the states which is unlikely occurrence for a Korean)

ChuckMcM 13y ago

"Han agreed last month not to seek government contracts for three years, the register said." Hmmm, well if you're caught faking your science how do you ever get a job again where you can apply for a grant? One would hope he would switch professions at this point.

breadtk 13y ago
Perhaps he will spend the next three years studying for a new field?
jmpeax 13y ago
Hopefully the people reviewing his grants in three years time will remember him.

a_olt 13y ago

Besides the issue of his seemingly trivial prosecution that others posters have noted, I also wonder what he spent the grant on, or planned to?

tensor 13y ago
Unless science funding is different in the US, and as far as I know it is not, he cannot spend it on personal things. The worst he could do is buy himself some computers "for research" then use them for only for personal use, or give them to family. Purchases still need to go through the university. Sometimes grant money even has restrictions on this, e.g. it can be used only for students. He most likely did this to get more resources for research work. E.g. it was motivated by a desire for fame and status.
- Fomite 13y ago
  Yeah, this is likely much less about "stuff" as much as keeping an active lab going, securing tenure, bright, big publications etc.
- ssmoot 13y ago
  Reading the thread sibling responses, it seems plausible you could get around that? (I'm just a lay-person.) I mean, you pay the University $XX for "misc facilities and support". That goes into the school's fund. Later, the Dean gives you a "completely unrelated and coincidental" Xmas bonus of $X. Also out of the school's fund. It's not grant money at that point. It's from a general discretionary fund that just happens to get deposits for services provided to grant based science. So... money laundering basically I guess?
discardorama 13y ago
Having worked at a university research lab in the US, let me tell you that the situation isn't as clean as most people believe. When you apply for a grant, you add an "overhead" amount, which is specified as a percentage of the grant. A typical number is 50%: if you want $X for your lab, you apply for $X * 1.5, with the reasoning that the extra 50% is for the university to provide you with facilities, tuition wavers for your students, computer support, etc. So far, so good. What many people don't know is that of that 50% that the university collects, about 20% (actual figure can vary a lot) comes to the Dean's slush fund (so, about 10% of the grant itself using above figures). The Dean can use this money to give young faculty starter research grants; but more often, the Dean can use this money to dole out discretionary bonuses (which can be very large) to the top research faculty. So if the grantee gets a $19MM grant, you can bet that he's making 100s of 1000s of dollars in bonuses from the Dean. Anyways, the system is quite messy if you take a closer look...

001sky 13y ago

The falsified results prompted more funding for the vaccine effort. But, of course... ;D http://www.kcci.com/news/central-iowa/isu-researcher-admits-to-faking-aids-research-resigns/-/9357080/23630668/-/v96wr/-/index.html?absolute=true http://www.kcci.com/news/central-iowa/isu-researcher-admits-...

auvrw 13y ago

one summer in college, i had a research-y project at a respected state school (which shall remain nameless except to say not a UC), wherein one of the program organizers publicly admitted to falsifying data. now this wasn't data that anyone was going to look at too carefully, and the justification was that it would get aid for some noble cause in need (although apparently not as in need as the prof. thought it ought to be), but... c'mon, "scientists," don't just start lying to people.