BIOETHICS

The Bioethics Imperative XXX
Snowballs! Cases Made Worse by Subsequent Actions
(continued from the May/June 2007 issue of the ASPB News)

“Mokita”: The truth we all know and agree not to talk about. Papua New Guinea

In a conversation in Washington, DC, in January 2007, James Kroll, head administrator for the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Inspector General (OIG), used the term “snowball” for cases that became worse once the OIG began to investigate an allegation. He was kind enough to relay to me some examples of this type of case. In this column I present the final two cases. The first two were presented in the May/June 2007 column; ASPB News, vol. 34, no. 3, p. 10.

Case 3. An allegation of plagiarism was made against a small business owned by the wife of a university professor. The primary responsibility of the professor, Dr. Noh Werk, was research in his specialty area. Dr. Werk had received a Phase I Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant for $100,000 and had begun a Phase II SBIR grant with another $100,000. Analysis of the Phase I final report showed that the entire 15-page report was copied from the thesis of one of Dr. Werk’s graduate students.

Investigation revealed that although the original Phase I proposal listed the former graduate student as the main researcher, the student had left the local area just as the grant was awarded and so could not possibly have fulfilled this role. Dr. Werk convinced his wife (president of the small business) to become the PI with the understanding that he would do the work. No work had ever been completed under the Phase I award, and the Phase II award was made on the basis of the fraudulent Phase I final report.

Interviews with Dr. Werk and his wife indicated that the wife was mostly a pawn in the affair—she knew little about the fraudulent efforts. Dr. Werk was submitting all the paperwork and forging her signature. When confronted, she admitted what little she knew.

This case was settled with a civil U.S. attorney. Dr. Werk agreed to pay back the $200,000. At settlement, a local judge found him guilty of filing false statements with the government, fined him an additional $15,000, and gave him a five-year suspended jail sentence. Dr. Werk also lost his position at the university.

Case 4. A university informed the NSF OIG that it had completed an investigation into alleged misrepresentations in an NSF renewal proposal submitted by a researcher. The university alleged that the proposal falsely implied that the data in one figure were gathered from the experimental system that was the focus of the proposal, that the proposal falsely claimed that two different compounds could be used to establish conditions necessary for particular experiments, and that a procedure used to prepare samples from the experimental system did not work as claimed in the proposal.

Following the university’s investigation, the researcher withdrew the renewal proposal from review at NSF. Shortly thereafter, he submitted a revised renewal proposal, and NSF provided a large, multiyear award based on its contents.

The NSF OIG reviewed the results of the university’s investigation and the researcher’s revised proposal and decided to initiate its own independent investigation into the allegations. (Note: NSF awarded the funds because at that point there was only an allegation of wrongdoing, i.e., one is innocent until proven guilty.) The NSF review determined that the researcher’s failure to identify the actual experimental system used to gather the data in the figure was misleading. The text of the proposal falsely implied that the experimental system used was the one the researcher described as the focus of his proposed research.
The researcher claimed that his renewal proposal statements about the two compounds were based on oral conversations with his graduate student. He included these statements in his proposal, even though he seriously doubted the student’s experimental and recordkeeping abilities and had not reviewed the data before including them.

Although the revised renewal proposal claimed that the sample preparation procedure was suitable for the proposed experiments and that the procedure worked “routinely,” the NSF OIG learned that the investigator’s laboratory could rarely, if ever, gather usable data from these samples. The proposal also failed to describe the laboratory’s actual abilities to prepare the samples.

The researcher’s annual reports for his first NSF award claimed, as progress, preliminary data that he had collected with a collaborator two years before his receipt of any NSF research funds. In these progress reports, he also failed to acknowledge his collaborator. Further review showed that the researcher’s renewal proposal did not state that his laboratory was unable to conduct the proposed research in the experimental system emphasized in his original proposal. He told the NSF OIG that he had not discussed his inability to conduct the proposed research because of NSF’s proposal page limitation. Yet in place of discussions about actual progress, the researcher continued to repeat descriptions of experimental results conducted long before he received NSF support.

The NSF OIG concluded that the researcher intentionally misrepresented his laboratory’s progress and its ability to conduct certain experiments to ensure continued support from NSF. The OIG also concluded that these actions constituted misconduct in science.

On the basis of these findings, the researcher received a letter of reprimand concluding that he had committed misconduct in science. For a period of three years, he was required to submit a certification that any proposal or report submission was free of misconduct and to obtain assurance from a knowledgeable university official who had reviewed his research records that the submission was accurate and complete. NSF reduced the annual increment of the researcher’s award to $65,000 or to an amount commensurate with the program officer’s evaluation of his research capabilities and reduced the duration of any award to the researcher to two years or a length of time commensurate with the program officer’s evaluation of the researcher’s research capabilities.

Three years later, the NSF OIG determined that the researcher had failed to comply with the restrictions specified in the letter of reprimand; he had not been supplying certifications and assurances with his submissions to the agency. Therefore, the agency extended his period of certification and assurance for another three years.

These four cases presented in this column and the prior issue’s column are remarkable because they imply that the NSF OIG uncovers only a fraction of the problems that must be ongoing in the public sector and because they indicate that people have an immense capacity to compound their own problems. Whether this blindness is just rationalization (e.g., “I’ll never be caught”) or reflects true ignorance about ethical behavior is not clear.

Next time: Does gender matter?

Dina Mandoli
mandoli@u.washington.edu