Professor admits faking AIDS vaccine to get $19M in grants | Hacker News Reader

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

nypost.com

101 pointslmg64350 comments

"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

[1] 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_pr...

[3] https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2013/12/23/2013-304...

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Counterexamples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell

http://www.janelia.org/

The governments of yore were truly visionary, to provide public funding for science before the concept even existed.

If the amount of funding somehow remained the same... Which I find highly unlikely. It would definitely cut down on the bureaucracy and make things significantly faster.

Maybe a YC for science is in order?

"YC-backed FizzleBit Labs founder Jonas Salk announces his Polio Vaccine as a Service, currently in closed private beta, has been acquired by Facebook for an undisclosed amount. Insiders are calling this an 'acquihire', and it's likely that Dr. Salk's polio vaccine product will be shut down by the end of the year."

You choose a particularly bad example, since Salk's effort was run as a completely private effort, aka "the march of dimes" (although it did enjoy FDR's bully pulpit). It was a nonprofit, too, so would you say the same thing about Watsi?

I don't know much about how the science industry works, only that a lot of medication/drugs are patented, so the suppliers make the money by being the guys who can produce said drug, until the patent expires, then everything becomes cheap. Afterwhich they make a new drug and do the same thing?

Science with short-term commercially exploitable goals might.

private != for profit.

Learn some history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell

You would think, but this guy:

http://www.scu.edu/engineering/bioengineering/Zhang.cfm

Was involved in several retractions that were almost certainly fraudulent. Officially. Unofficially, they were fraudulent (I worked fairly closely with several of the prinicpals in the situation - minus Zhang and Schultz, of course, although Schultz was on my committee - who are convinced the material were made up):

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/01/07/extortion_re...

It's not as prestigious as the place he was before, but he seems to be doing okay. The system protects its own.

"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.

Hopefully the people reviewing his grants in three years time will remember him.

Perhaps he will spend the next three years studying for a new field?

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...

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.

I was under the impression that the name Dong-Pyou Han was of Korean origin?

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)

I think you've got it wrong: http://www.nature.com/emm/journal/v32/n1/abs/emm20002a.html

He was previously affiliated with Yonsei University, located in Seoul.

Not to nitpick on the race here but Pyou is not a valid phonetic in any Chinese name.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Dong-Pyou+Han

Looking at his publications, he seems to be Korean. You can breathe easy. ;-)

Ugh.

> "I was thinking, "please don't be Chinese" when I read the title. Fuck."

Why, is this "a thing"? The closest thing I can think off the top of my head as another example is Hwang Woo-suk, but he was Korean.

This wiki page doesn't seem to have many Chinese names: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_misconduct

google: asian pressure to succeed

yeilds 7.660 million results

Its a generic and terrible stereotype, but then again | data

http://www.realclearscience.com/2013/09/30/china039s_black_m...

http://www.economist.com/news/china/21586845-flawed-system-j...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/world/asia/07fraud.html?pa...

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-12/02/china-academi...

Again, not any excuse for an overzealous association but the data are out there.

Perhaps he did not have a career to speak of. He was a assistant professor, so perhaps he needed something big to get tenure, or leave anyhow.

Edit This is a comment about the state of the educational system, not an excuse for forging data.

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.

Maybe he's not that smart. He's an assistant professor, and who knows how many times he had cheated or plagiarized to even get to that position.

This. And what about the honest guy whose career was trampled so this guy could get the professorship?

Why is that obvious? We are all totally unaware of what percentage of the time that lie succeeds.

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.

The falsified results prompted more funding for the vaccine effort.

But, of course... ;D

http://www.kcci.com/news/central-iowa/isu-researcher-admits-...

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.

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?

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...

<citation needed>.

I've never heard of this kind of kickback scheme, in >10 years at several large research universities in the US.

Citation?! I'm telling you from experience. The best known example I can give you is: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/Stanford_Resear...

Here's a recent article about universities resisting efforts to curb overheads: http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2013/03/17/harvard-mi...

Were I work you can get a bonus on the order of 40K for getting a grant of about 2M.

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.

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?

Yeah, this is likely much less about "stuff" as much as keeping an active lab going, securing tenure, bright, big publications etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com