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MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas has forced out three senior researchers with ties to China. The move comes amid nationwide investigations by federal officials into whether researchers are pilfering intellectual property from US research institutions and running "shadow laboratories" abroad, according to a joint report by Science magazine and the Houston Chronicle.
The National Institutes of Health began sending letters to the elite cancer center last August regarding the conduct of five researchers there. The letters discussed "serious violations" of NIH policies, including leaking confidential NIH grant proposals under peer review to individuals in China, failing to disclose financial ties in China, and other conflicts of interest. MD Anderson moved to terminate three of those researchers, two of whom resigned during the termination process. The center cleared the fourth and is still investigation[sic] the fifth.
The move follows years of probing from the FBI, which first contacted MD Anderson back in 2015 with such concerns, according to MD Anderson President Dr. Peter Pisters. In December 2017, MD Anderson handed over hard drives containing employee emails to FBI investigators. That same year, a report by the US Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property used some rough calculations to estimate that IP theft by all parties cost the country upward of $225 billion, potentially as high as $600 billion, each year. The report called China the "world's principal IP infringer."
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday April 24 2019, @04:21PM (1 child)
Surely if they really committed a crime, they'd be arrested and charged... Right?
Alternatively, what I'm getting from "Breach of peer review confidentiality" is that the pharmaceuticals sent papers to a 100 reviewers so when 97% say it's rubbish they'd release it with the approval of the remaining three. Additionally they performed the experiments in a dozen Chinese and African labs and only included the successful results in their papers. After a while, the Chinese speaking reviewers in MD Anderson picked up on this thanks to some rumors from back home and started contacting relevant labs to double check for the real results and even try and replicate some of simpler experiments. When big-pharma realized this they contacted the hospitals to get them out but the hospital couldn't find a good excuse so the FBI was brought over. They didn't manage to pin anything worthwhile but they did manage to find a loophole in their contracts that got them fired.
How will we know which version is the truth? Easy. When they charge them with a crime they'll give a testimony since their NDA woudln't be effective once under a criminal investigation. Of course, that only works IF they actually charge them with a crime...
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(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday April 24 2019, @04:26PM
Btw, remember He Jiankui? Everyone said he was using outdated techniques so that alone made his work unethical... Well, a few American researchers were up-to-date with his work (but didn't know about the forged approval papers) and had nothing bad to say about the science it self: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/health/gene-editing-babies.html [nytimes.com]
Then and now, the more you dig into these stories the dirtier it gets.
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