An Unwelcome Discovery (Scientific Fraud)

An Unwelcome Discovery

By JENEEN INTERLANDI
Published: October 22, 2006

On a rainy afternoon in June, Eric Poehlman stood before a federal judge in the United States District Court in downtown Burlington, Vt. His sentencing hearing had dragged on for more than four hours, and Poehlman, dressed in a black suit, remained silent while the lawyers argued over the appropriate sentence for his transgressions. Now was his chance to speak. A year earlier, in the same courthouse, Poehlman pleaded guilty to lying on a federal grant application and admitted to fabricating more than a decade’s worth of scientific data on obesity, menopause and aging, much of it while conducting clinical research as a tenured faculty member at the University of Vermont. He presented fraudulent data in lectures and in published papers, and he used this data to obtain millions of dollars in federal grants from the National Institutes of Health — a crime subject to as many as five years in federal prison. Poehlman’s admission of guilt came after more than five years during which he denied the charges against him, lied under oath and tried to discredit his accusers. By the time Poehlman came clean, his case had grown into one of the most expansive cases of scientific fraud in U.S. history.

“I need to start out by apologizing,” Poehlman said now, standing at the lectern before the judge. Speaking quickly and stammering occasionally, he apologized to friends and former colleagues, some of whom were listening in the back of the courtroom. He apologized to his mother, who sat in the front row, crying. And he apologized to Walter DeNino, the former protégé who turned him in, who was also sitting in the courtroom, several rows back on the prosecution’s side. “I have wanted to say I’m sorry for five years,” Poehlman said, without turning around to face DeNino. “I want to make it very clear I am remorseful. I accept the responsibility. There’s no way that I can turn back the clock. And I’m not that individual that I was years ago.”

Before his fall from grace, Poehlman oversaw a lab where nearly a dozen students and postdoctoral researchers carried out his projects. His research earned him recognition among his peers and invitations to speak at conferences around the world. And he made nearly $140,000, one of the top salaries at the University of Vermont. All of that began to change six years ago, when DeNino took his concerns about anomalies in Poehlman’s data to university officials. The subsequent investigation — a collaboration among the University of Vermont, the Office of Research Integrity (which is within the Department of Health and Human Services) and the United States Department of Justice — uncovered fraudulent research that stretched back through almost half of Poehlman’s career. The revelations led to the retraction or correction of 10 scientific papers, and Poehlman was banned forever from receiving public research money. He was only the second scientist in the United States to face criminal prosecution for falsifying research data.

At 50, with his career in ruins and his reputation destroyed, Poehlman could only hope to avoid one final humiliation: becoming the first researcher sentenced to prison for scientific misconduct. Citing the nearly $200,000 Poehlman had paid in restitution, his attorneys had asked the judge to sentence him to supervised probation. “I am hoping that you can consider this sentence fair and just to me, as well as the community,” Poehlman pleaded, without “a sentence of incarceration or imprisonment.”

more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/magazine/22sciencefraud.html

He corrupted everything he touched.

I hope he can teach his fellow prisoners better than he did the students at the University of Vermont.

years I must say that I believe that what Mr. Poehlman did is quite common. And, I do not say that lightly. I KNOW that it is going on all the time.

with this guy. That kind of crap needs to stop. On so many levels it is wrong. What the false research does to peole. How it effects other research. And it's also stealing from the tax payers. Those are three seprate charges. Persons caught doing this, should be expected to face all three charges. And be liable to the persons they personaly hurt. Including OTHER research groups, patents, etc.

And the person who turned him in, should get well rewarded. So others would be gutsy enough to come forward.

with his faked findings, how many he's gotten onto HRT they didn't need, setting them up for major problems like breast cancer later in life.

Faked research like this ends up hurting real human beings. That's why this guy is a criminal, not the breach of trust in the medical profession angle the NYT was pushing.

Maybe not as evil as ending habeas corpus and allowing torture, but evil nonetheless. Shun him. Make him give flu shots in charity clinics.

I doubt whether jail time is appropriate, however.

is that it gives the fundies more ammunition in their attacks on scientific research. It allows them the old, "See, they're all crooks and liars. Science is evil!" accusations. I'm sure the freepers are having a field day with this one.

I'm not sure if jail time is warranted, but I have to agree with ending his career. Some community service would be appropriate, but not in research, of course.