Merrill Goozner is an award-winning journalist and author of “The $800 Million Pill: The Truth Behind the Cost of New Drugs” who writes regularly at Gooznews.com.
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A former top scientist and aide at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who were working on developing immune-suppression drugs faked research data, leading to the retraction of 14 of 16 papers the pair published in the medical literature over the past decade, the Scientist reported today. The fraud, uncovered by the university and the government’s Office of Research Integrity, involved over $23 million in National Institutes of Health grants.
UAB’s Judith Thomas and Juan Contreras, a surgeon and a former post-doc in her lab, claimed to have performed double kidney removals on rhesus monkeys in an effort to prove the efficacy of two immune system suppression drugs. She at first tried to blame the fraud on Contreras, but was later found to have known about the faked experiments, the Scientist claimed.
Thomas resigned her full professorship in January 2008 and was banned from receiving NIH grants for 10 years. Contreras resigned last week and will receive a three-year timeout. The Scientist reported near the end of its story that the motive for the fraud was “unclear.”
Comment: Generally speaking, there are two possible motives for scientific fraud, both of which are financial at their core. One is the professional need to register successes in government grant-funded programs in order to keep the grants flowing. That certainly may have been in play here.
The other possible motivation would have been the hope that they were going to cash in on the successful development of immuno-suppression drugs. AÂ quick search of the U.S. Patent and Trademarks Office database reveals that Judith Thomas is co-inventor on at least two patents and has several pending patent applications. One is for the general method of inducing immune tolerance using immunotoxins (Patent #7,125,553) and the other is a specific method of using an immunotoxin to suppress rejection of transplated pancreatic islet cells (Patent #7,288,254). The first-named inventor on both patents is David M. Neville, a senior scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health, whose work over the years has focused on using immune-suppression drugs to facilitate transplant tolerance.
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