Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fede_V | Hacker News Reader

What drives me absolutely crazy about the story is this:

"Duke officials admitted that mistakes were made, but didn’t respond to specific questions."

Note the passive tone. These are not junior people we are dealing with. These are very senior deans and professors that will face absolutely no accountability whatsoever for trying to cover up a case of serious misconduct - and the incredibly brave student that spoke out was threatened into silence.

It reminds me of the Schon scandal at Bell Labs. Again, someone faked a huge amount of data, and bosses were all too happy to put their names at the end of all the high impact papers he produced... yet again, when the fraud came to light, none of the bosses suffered absolutely any repercussion.

View on HN

You have to remember this is the same faculty who were at the heart of the Duke Lacrosse rape case and who went out of their way to publicly humiliate the players involved and even after they had been proven innocent, refused to retract their public statements on the case.

To me, this is about par for the course with the Duke Faculty members.

Luckily the DA responsible for that case was disgraced and disbarred. Looks like something similar should be in order for the current crop.

It also seems par for the course to remove Durham DA's...Nifong's successor (Tracey Cline) eventually fell as well: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/20/d...

Also, for those who don't know the accuser was also later convicted on second-degree murder charges: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Mangum#Second-degree_mu...

What's criminal is that this impacted cancer trials. Yes, mistakes were made, and yes, people should go to jail for this.

Don't forget, somebody was possibly denied the job and his or her trajectory possibly changed because of this lying SOB.

I think everyone more or less agrees that Anil Potti is a disgrace to science, and he has been practically blacklisted from mainstream science.

What this article shows though, is that his bosses were directly involved in the cover up - and lied through their teeth about the lack of a whistleblower to the people who went through clinical trials based on made up data.

Now, Potti took the fall - what will happen to those people who tried to silence the whistle blower? I'm not suggesting they are as guilty as Potti, but if you are willing to share in the credit, you must be willing to take a portion of the blame when things turn sour.

> if you are willing to share in the credit, you must be willing to take a portion of the blame when things turn sour

Ah...reminds me of a good Wire quote from Lieutenant Daniels: "You should never take credit when the crime rate drops, unless you want to take the blame when its rises."

If they are as guilty as the article suggests, they should go to jail too. Just losing your career isn't enough.

Don't get caught.

And make sure there's no one above you when you do.

You mean "jails should be filled" :) Hey two can play this game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_were_made

It's amazing how some phrases that start out as completely negative eventually become valid excuses.

"Best and Brightest" is another phrase that took a weird turn. The original [1] use from the 1970s was entirely negative but people use it unironically these days.

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22best+and+br...

"Meritocracy" will always be my favorite.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com