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posted by martyb on Monday April 24 2017, @10:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the follow-the-money? dept.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/power-struggle-erupts-utah-cancer-institute-over-director-s-firing

The abrupt dismissal of the head of a Utah cancer center is causing backlash from its faculty—and its major philanthropic funder—in a struggle over the center's autonomy from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. And nearly 2000 researchers have signed a petition calling on the university to reverse its decision.

For 11 years, prominent cell biologist Mary Beckerle has headed the Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI), which is based at the university but receives its funding largely from philanthropic donations, revenue from its cancer hospital, and grants from state and from the National institutes of Health. In an email to some clinical staff on Monday, university President David Pershing and Vivian Lee, senior vice president for health sciences, announced that Beckerle would step down "effective yesterday," but would "remain on faculty as a distinguished professor in biology." Beckerle, who has not responded to Science's request for comment, told The Salt Lake Tribune that she had learned of her dismissal in an email less than an hour earlier.

Details have been scant from the university, which also did not respond to a comment request. But Beckerle's colleagues contend that the move amounts to a hostile takeover by the university aimed at capturing the cancer clinic's revenue, and other prominent scientists are rallying unquestioningly around her.

Also at Deseret News. Change.org petition. University of Utah Health press release.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24 2017, @04:57PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24 2017, @04:57PM (#498943)

    Apparently the" babies don't feel pain" thing clashed too much with intuition to be accepted by people using normal (as opposed to NHST) logic once it was brought to light. There are certainly many other errors of the same type that will not be caught this way.

    Just as a made up example, do you have intuition about how many molecules of glucose need to be transported into the cell to supply raw material for 1 um^ 2 of yeast vacuolar membrane in 15 minutes? Probably not, but there are tons of studies that fall apart if you start looking at them quantitatively like that.