Posted by Erin Elizabeth | Apr 2, 2019
This is appalling. Quite honestly, they should have to do so much more than pay that paltry amount. In fact, I’d wager that each and every single one of the studies they did, should be redone. Period.
Duke University agreed to repay the federal government to the tune of $112.5 million, to settle claims it falsified scientific research at the taxpayers’ expense.
According to the DOJ, Duke “violated the False Claims Act by submitting applications and progress reports that contained falsified research on federal grants to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).”
The whistleblower, former Duke employee Joseph Thomas (who will get $33.75 million from the settlement) reported that from 2006 to 2018, the university falsified research on nearly $200 million worth of grants from the NIH and EPA.
“The chief researcher at the center of the scandal, Erin Potts-Kant, had more than a dozen papers stemming from her work on mice retracted. Prosecutors said the school’s higher-ups knew about her fraudulent research but allowed it to continue. The school had contended it didn’t learn until later.”
But this isn’t the only issue Duke is dealing with; more than a decade ago, Duke medical professor Anil Potti was engaged in misconduct while researching treatments in human cancer patients. And those studies went on to be published in top medical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and Lancet Oncology between 2006 and 2009. While Mr. Potti did reach a settlement with the federal health agency, he did not have to acknowledge liability but only agree to have all his research supervised until 2020. How is that acceptable? And why on earth wasn’t he fired?
Potti left Duke in 2010 and the university was left to settle lawsuits brought by patients and estates of patients who had participated in those trials.
That this has happened not once but twice at a university believed to be very prestigious, is a vindication that we cannot simply roll over and blindly trust the established, Western medical system. Not by a long shot.
Matthew G.T. Martin, United States Attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina said, “Taxpayers expect & deserve that federal grant dollars will be used efficiently and honestly. Individuals & institutions that receive research funding from the federal government must be scrupulous in conducting research for the common good & rigorous in rooting out fraud. May this serve as a lesson that the use of false or fabricated data in grant applications or reports is completely unacceptable.”
The once believed “prestigious” private school in Durham, North Carolina, said it will take “additional steps on ‘research integrity’ & says it already has implemented more monitoring of research in the wake of the scandal, involving a health researcher & her supervisors.” But can we really trust them?
SOURCE: Washington Times, The United States Department of Justice
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