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at 12.10pm, repeated Mondays at 7.10pm with Sharon Carleton What happens to the Whistleblowers?Saturday 3 September 2005SummaryOver 30 years of broadcasting The Science Show has exposed many irregular activities at our universities and research institutions. From the accusations of scientific fraud directed at Dr William McBride to the more recent turbulence around Dr Bruce Hall. They have had remarkable repercussions and won Norman Swan some of the highest awards in journalism. But would he do it again? And what happens to those who blow the whistle?Program TranscriptRobyn Williams: ABC Radio National – this is The Science Show . Our first program went to air 30 years ago on the 31st August. Last week we remembered some of the frolics - OK we told some fibs. This week, the scientists who deceived, but more, those who blew the whistle on the deceit. The whistleblowers, where are they now? In a minute we shall join Sharon Carleton, long a friend of The Science Show , after we’ve been to this function on campus.Speaker: Good evening everybody, let me just welcome you all to our faculty dinner. Now I don’t pretend it’s been an easy year, OK. In spite of the difficulties our faculty has a lot to be proud of, as I’m sure the Vice Chancellor will be emphasising in her address a bit later. But for now, enjoy the meal and have a great night. Man 1: Great night! It’s been a long year and it’s suddenly got a whole lot longer since it hit the media. Man 2: I mean, thank God he’s not here, there’d be a queue of people waiting to knock his block off. Man 1: Yeah, and I’d be the first. Woman: What I want to know is, does he have any idea of the damage he’s done, it’s affected all of us. Man 1: The University’s reputation is mud. Man 2: Still, he got what he deserved, he got the flick and he’ll find it hard to get a job in science anywhere now. Man 1: Got what he deserved? He drags us through the shit, ruins it for everyone to do with the lab and for what? A year’s leave on half pay and early retirement. Woman: Well hang on, there was the brick through the window. Man 1: He was lucky it was just a brick. Woman: And the death threats to his family. Man 1: Ah, you don’t know where they came from. How do you know he didn’t make them up? Sharon Carleton: Excuse me, Sharon Carleton, Radio National, The Science Show . I was just wondering, who you’re talking about? He must have done something awful or he must have committed a pretty big fraud to deserve all this. What did he do? Man 2: He didn’t commit the fraud, he exposed it. Phil Vardy: Whistle blowers get chewed up and spat out. James Rossiter: When it became well known I received quite a large number of telephone calls during the night, threatening my life. Clara He: Given my experience, I would say that I would never, ever do it again. John Talent: There were no particularly dire consequences, just a few death threats. Sharon Carleton: Four Australian scientists who had the guts to blow the whistle on shoddy or fraudulent science. Their stories are not happy ones. Hello, I’m Sharon Carleton. Scientific fraud is as old as the craft itself. Galileo, Newton and Mendel produced results just a little too perfectly matched to their theoretical predictions. Louis Pasteur’s public theatrical explanations, akin to publishing today, were often a serious distortion of his private records. In the early 1900s there was the famous hoax, Piltdown man, when a whole generation of scientists in England, wanting to believe that the earliest human was of course British, was taken in by a transparent prank. In April this year, Australia’s seven ombudsmen expressed public concern over the increasing number of complaints about universities. NSW Deputy Ombudsman, Mr Chris Wheeler. Chris Wheeler: There hasn’t been a consistent national approach. The Commonwealth ombudsman has described the Australian Capital Territory Act as ‘unexpectedly complex’ and the former NSW Solicitor General has referred to the ‘generous opacity’ of the NSW Legislation. The Western Australian ombudsman has raised significant concerns about the interpretation of various provisions of that act. Sharon Carleton: So what was some of the weaknesses in the legislation across Australia that you identified? Chris Wheeler: I think the starting point is to identify what are the prerequisites that should be met by legislation for it to be effective. The three prerequisites would be ensuring the protection of whistleblowers, ensuring the disclosures are properly dealt with, and facilitating the making of disclosures. And if you look at the legislation around Australia, some of them address some of these prerequisites, none of them address all of them. Reader: NSW Ombudsman’s Report, April 2004. It would be reasonable to think that whistleblowers would be rewarded, instead there continues to be a deep-seated culture that disapproves of people who criticise their colleagues or superiors. These people are considered to be ‘dobbers’, a derogatory term implying personal disloyalty. Sharon Carleton: It takes courage to go against the prevailing culture. Dr Phil Vardy. Phil Vardy: Courage, um, I wasn’t sure what to do, where to go, how to proceed, what policy to adopt and there’s an internal wrestle to confront or not to confront. I wouldn’t use the word courage. Sharon Carleton: The year was 1982. Two junior researchers, Phil Vardy and Jill French at the Sydney based Medical Research Centre, Foundation 41 has serious doubts about their director, Dr William McBride. Phil Vardy: Faced with scientific fraud you have to expose it, and although it’s painful and you don’t like doing it, there’s really no choice other than to expose it. Sharon Carleton: Why do you say it’s painful when it’s simply the right thing to do? Phil Vardy: Well, Bill McBride was almost a friend. He was clearly my boss and there was an enormous status difference between us, but Bill McBride is not, was not an unlikeable man. Sharon Carleton: William McBride achieved star status in the early 60s when he had a short letter published on the link between the morning sickness drug Thalidomide and birth deformities. Twenty years later, Dr McBride became interested in another morning sickness drug, Debendox, that he suspected of also causing birth deformities. He asked Vardy and French to conduct some experiments on rabbit embryos. Two years later they were horrified to discover their names as co-authors with McBride on a paper published in the Australian Journal of Biological Sciences. In it, their original data on the rabbit experiments had been altered and the results they actually achieved had been changed. Vardy and French confronted McBride but got nowhere. He used his spurious results to damn Debendox and its American equivalent, Bendectin. The drug was basically forced off the market in 1983 – the drug company simply couldn’t afford more legal action. In Australia, it took six years before Foundation 41 set up an independent enquiry into McBride, and that only after the fraud was made public. Phil Vardy had telephoned Robyn Williams at The Science Show , but was actually put through to Dr. Norman Swan, presenter of the Health Report. Norman Swan: Well, I knew who he was and I had been told in the past that he wouldn’t talk, he was so traumatised by the experience in 1982 and it took me a long time, but eventually convinced him that it was in the greater good for him to talk. And in the first instance I just wanted to see his evidence because I hadn’t seen the evidence, I’d just heard tittle tattle that there had been fraud. I didn’t know. And so in the first instance I just wanted him to show me what he had. And when he showed me what he had it was absolutely clear that Dr. McBride had committed scientific fraud. Sharon Carleton: Did you have any doubts about going to air about it? Norman Swan: The only doubts I had about it were the impact on his family. Sharon Carleton: Norman Swan put the story to air in December, 1987 on The Science Show . Robyn Williams: Hello, I’m Robyn Williams and today, a special report produced and presented by Norman Swan about scientific fraud. Norman Swan: This is a program about the conduct of science and how misconduct can escape detection, be covered up or just ignored. Phil Vardy: You’ve almost got no choice, it’s going to be painful no matter what you do. You either live with internal sense of defeat and guilt about not confronting your boss or the perpetrator of the fraud or you’ve got to go through that terrible confrontation with the boss or the perpetrator to reveal the fraud. And there’s this sense of rage that comes, as to why has this happened to me? And I think that’s universal – all sorts of other people who go through traumas in their life have that same sense of anger and rage initially anyway. It’s terrible. I don’t think I lost any friends. The scientific staff seemed to understand. In a way they understood almost too readily, as if they were primed to believe that McBride could engage in scientific fraud, so in a way, this was not news out of the blue. He had worked with the psychologists and the cytogeneticists and the pharmacologists and the biologists and in doing so McBride had revealed his scientific modus operandi to them and his bias on data and things like that. It was almost as though they suspected that this was in the background but no one had proof of it. Along comes Phil Vardy, ashen faced, as someone said, and said, ‘Look, I think I’ve discovered something terrible’. Sharon Carleton: So it was easy for you was it, after that? Phil Vardy: I think whistle blowers beat themselves up more than anyone else beats them up. It’s not easy to confront a boss with an accusation of fraud. The other thing that’s involved is the reputation of Australian science suffers. The reputation in my case of Foundation 41 certainly suffered, we had the dream of building something significant in Sydney in biological research. For instance, there’s no Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Sydney and there was just the possibility that with the right funding, Foundation 41 could have been built into one of the major molecular scientific research institutions of Australia, if not the world. And therefore, what was a stake for the scientific staff was that that aim of building something significant in science in Sydney was going to be poured down the drain basically. Sharon Carleton: Dr William McBride was eventually found guilty of scientific fraud and deregistered. Foundation 41 folded. But what happened to Phil Vardy? Phil Vardy: Those years of 1988 and 1989 were particularly difficult and they were difficult because McBride and I became locked into a battle about the revelation of the truth. What was a relatively small matter he tried to cover up and lie, you then become locked into a personal battle about the revelation of the truth and in the end you get a Pyrrhic victory. Sharon Carleton: What happened to your personal life? Phil Vardy: That’s probably a question you should put to my ex-wife. Gail Vardy: Phil is an incredible person. A lesser man would have fallen apart with it. He put his energies into other things, he went out and he did marathon racing in an ordinary wheelchair, he then started to sail. He did all these things to try and get rid of that anger, but then just couldn’t sustain relationships after that. Sharon Carleton: Gail Vardy, who now lives in Tasmania. Gail Vardy: Oh, I think it was probably the most isolated and upsetting time of anyone’s life. It was very lonely, scared, very scared. We had spent a lot of time together facing heaps and heaps of challenges. Our marriage was more challenging than most because of Phil’s disability. We’d moved from Brisbane where we had mutual friends and family, to Sydney where we had none. Financially we’d only just started to get on our feet. We had a new babe. Scott was the first child born in Australia and probably in the world, by a father with Phil’s level of disability and the time after his accident, and we were really flattered that McBride said, ‘Oh, I’ll look after Gail’. I felt really sorry for Phil, because science to him was truth. Sharon Carleton: Had you any idea really of the difficulties that you were about to face? Gail Vardy: None, none whatsoever. Sharon Carleton: When Phil Vardy resigned from Foundation 41 after unsuccessfully confronting McBride, he took a part time job. He had a wife and a young child to support, a mortgage and all the additional expenses which face a person in a wheelchair. Finally, he accepted a ten-month university tutorship in Launceston. Gail and their son Scott remained in Sydney, and the marriage started to fall apart. Gail Vardy: A lot of it was financially based, and I know that sounds a bit funny, but when you’re in a wheelchair and you’ve got to run a car that’s modified, you’ve got to have a house that’s modified all that sort of stuff, and Phil only ever believed that he would die at 50, that he wouldn’t have a normal life span, a lot of those things were driven by a lack of security. I think emotionally he became very withdrawn, not only from me but also from Scott. Sharon Carleton: Do you feel bitter about the whole thing? Gail Vardy: This will sound stupid but I still love that guy, I feel more upset about it and I bitterly regret what happened to us. Sharon Carleton: Phil Vardy, the gutsy paraplegic, got his PhD, had papers published and moved into academia - until he discovered the wonders of sailing. Since the mid 90s he’s been immersed in establishing the Australian Disabled Sailing Movement and is former chairman of Sailability Australia. And he’s in the final stages of a law degree, just for good measure. The McBride affair caused such a scandal, legislation became an imperative; there had to be a legal structured system which was fair to both the complainants and the accused. Norman Swan: So what happened after McBride was that the Australian Vice Chancellor’s Committee and NH&MRC; got together to create scientific guidelines for a good scientific practice. And we were on of the first countries in the world to do that and that’s a good thing. It’s very hard to legislate against something like this; you’ve really got to get people to change their behaviour. Clara He: Given my experience I would say I would never, ever do it again even though I firmly believe I’m doing the right thing. I probably will tell whoever comes to me for advice whether or not I should blow the whistle. I would tell all of them please don’t if you want to survive. If you do you’ve got to prepare to end of everything you’ve built up. Sharon Carleton: Dr Clara He, one of the complainants against transplant immunologist Professor Bruce Hall at the University of NSW. This is the most difficult case to look at, there’s still outstanding litigation, the 12 or 13 enquiries, internal and external, sometimes contradict or conflict, no one’s innocent, no one’s guilty and everyone’s damaged by it. Four years ago, Bruce Hall, one of the Transplant Society’s top scientists, was accused of gross misconduct by members of his own laboratory. Professor Hall has strenuously denied these allegations. Frustrated by an apparent lack of official action, Dr Clara He approached Norman Swan. Norman Swan: Well, I normally say no to seeing people like this because I’m not keen on taking on yet more investigative stories such as this. I’m also not keen on being known as the fraud buster, you know, the man who shot Liberty Valance, and that’s the only thing you’re every known for. So I normally say no, but in fact a very senior person in research phoned me and said, ‘Look, would you see this person, it’s terrible what’s going on’. And I didn’t know who it was about. So this meeting started in the cafeteria at the ABC on a Friday afternoon and then about seven or eight minutes into the conversation I said, ‘Who’s this Bruce you’re talking about?’ because they assumed that I knew, and said, ‘Oh, Bruce Hall’. And my reaction was one of shock; with Bruce Hall I actually knew him socially, I knew people that he’d work with in Stanford and worked with here, you know, I did not want to believe that Bruce Hall committed scientific fraud, or scientific misconduct. In fact, I wasn’t really prepared to believe that and so I resisted it and gave Clara probably a harder time than I would have normally done with a whistleblower. But when you actually saw the written evidence it was a clear as day. The problem with whistleblowers is that by the time they come and see someone like me they’re scarred. It’s a big deal coming to see a journalist, they’re scarred, they’re nervous, they’re depressed and they’re angry and it’s very hard to get beyond the emotion. They get into a kind of hate situation in terms of the person, so you’ve got to just sweep away the mushroom cloud and get to the core. And the core is the evidence, and with Clara the evidence was solid. So I went to air with it. Sharon Carleton: Did you try to try to dissuade her, did you warn her what could happen to her as a whistleblower? Norman Swan: What I do with whistleblowers is that I take what doctors would call ‘informed consent’. And one of the reasons I do that is because the person who’s the whistleblower’s got to stay with you through this and it’s a long journey, so you want to know they’re committed and if they’re not going to stay with you on it you’re probably better abandoning the story right at the beginning no matter how good the story is. And my informed consent goes something like this: you are coming to me to seek a remedy and you think that by going to air your problems will be solved and you will be happy. Let me tell you that going to air is not a remedy and you will be vilified, you will be criticised, your personal life or your foibles will be exposed, you will be called a bad scientist, you’ll be called everything under the sun and the journey will just be beginning after you go to air. It won’t be the end of the story, it will be the beginning. Clara He: I didn’t believe what he said. I thought once this thing is going to open then there will be a fair investigation started and then whatever the outcome I’m prepared. I thought the truth would be naturally dealt with, and I didn’t think that could be so hard until it really comes to me and I realised it was incredibly difficult to deal with. I would say this was the hardest decision in my life: not just a career, life is everything else is gone with it. It’s very destructive. Sharon Carleton: This is part of the Science Show broadcast in April 2002. Norman Swan: Hello, Norman Swan here sitting in the chair on the Science Show this week instead of Robyn Williams because today I have a special and disturbing feature for you. Reader: Why study at the University of NSW? The University of NSW is one of Australia’s major research institutions attracting top national competitive research grants and has extensive international research links. Norman Swan: In April last year Clara He was in the audience at the Transplantation Society of Australia and New Zealand’s annual conference. She heard Professor Hall present two experiments, which she and another lab worker, Dr Chen, claim were never done. The effect of these allegedly non-existent experiments was that they provided support for a theory which Professor Hall has been promoting for many years. We have the abstracts of the meeting, we have the lab books in which the experiments would have been recorded had they been performed at Liverpool Hospital, and we have testimony from Chen, who would have carried out the experiments. Now Professor Hall may claim that the experiments were done in the past or somewhere else, but he’s presented this work as though it was performed at Liverpool Hospital. And if it had been done elsewhere the conditions might have been different and the findings not comparable. Clara He also says that in an experiment that was done Professor Hall gave the opposite findings from those in the lab books. Clara He: I find myself almost like a criminal, I was so bad a person all of a sudden but just before I raised the allegation with the university I actually was promoted and that’s really something I feel amazed [about], how could…I was so criminal and I was promoted - and I was not just promoted, I had obtained an NH&MRC; major funding grant as a young scientist. I have received an international award for my research work but once I raised the allegation I’ve become a bad manager, I’ve become - I don’t even remember all the details of the accusations about me. However, scientific research probably is a highest principle for me, it really is a crisis period for me. I was told by the hospital to relocate, to move me out of the research laboratories so I was located in the place which has no research facility, therefore it’s quite hard to do my research without facility. And again the university told me I can’t use the animal houses internal breeding animals, I have to go to buy animals from Perth to import into here. The reason was that the animals bred are for Professor Hall and not for me so I can’t use it. Sharon Carleton: So what you’re saying is that you simply can’t do any research, is that basically it? Clara He: Ah yes, it’s a struggle, I can do a little but not meaningful research, which is what I like to do. Like the molecular part of the work, mechanisms how this immune tolerance was induced. I can’t do it, I can’t do this molecular work in my backyard or in my kitchen, so I need a facility but I was denied access to all of that. Sharon Carleton: So basically, what do you and Dr Chen, who’s sitting here with us now, what do you two do all day? Clara He: We engage with a different research group, we always can do all round another supporting work for a different project. But in terms of my own research work it is extremely difficult, extremely slow. Sharon Carleton: Clara He. Two of the significant enquiries into the Hall matter reached very different conclusions. One high level external investigation with a battery of world experts and headed by the former High Court Chief Justice, Sir Gerard Brennan, found Professor Hall had: Reader: Seriously deviated from practices commonly accepted for reporting research and that he’d stated a material and significant falsehood with reckless disregard for the truth and with deliberate intent to deceive. Sharon Carleton: Dr Clara He and her co-accusers thought they’d been vindicated, but there was a subsequent shorter enquiry under the university’s workplace agreement by the then vice-chancellor, Professor Rory Hume. Taking his own counsel, Professor Hume found the external experts had erred and there were extenuating circumstances for Professor Hall’s behaviour. The vice chancellor found Hall guilty only of the lesser charge of academic misconduct – meaning he would be censured and not sacked. This report split the science community. Norman Swan: So, let me get this straight: plucking data from thin air, recycling old research and new papers and telling porkies in a grant application is OK. Funny, I thought such doings were serious no nos construed at best as scientific misconduct or at worst scientific fraud. Apparently not. Sharon Carleton: Others, like one prominent immunologist reported in The Medical Journal, dismissed it out of hand. Speaker: It was much ado about nothing. Sharon Carleton: Then in June last year the university council, with a new vice chancellor, decided to draw a line under the whole affair. It adopted the damning Brennan enquiry, agreeing it was the most expert statement available on the issues – but… Reader: Given the lapse of time and considerations of natural justice and cost, resolved that no further disciplinary action be taken by the university. Norman Swan: As the result of the decision of Professor Hume, Professor Wainwright and the hierarchy of the University of NSW when it was decided that Bruce Hall would just get a slap on the wrists is that basically it’s OK to publish data that don’t exist as long as you do the experiment eventually and the experiment comes out the way you said it when you didn’t have the data. It’s OK to publish data you’ve published in the past without acknowledging it and I could go through it, there’s a whole series of things which a junior researcher who might not be ethical could get away with now at the University of NSW as a result of their decisions. They’re an appalling set of decisions which set the hair on end of many scientists at the University of NSW. That’s the legacy left. This is institutional failure. Sharon Carleton: Norman Swan. Professor Jeremy Davis was a staff-elected member of the Council of NSW University during all these investigations. Jeremy Davis: The mere fact that people outside the university find it difficult to know what conclusion to come to I can sympathise with, but the fact remains universities are sometimes rather clumsy collegial procedures and don’t produce simple clear outcomes. Although it could be argued there is a simple clear outcome in this case, which is that legally the final determination of Professor Hume that there was clear proof of misconduct but that it was academic misconduct and not severe academic misconduct is the final conclusion. Council was not seeking and does not have the power to subvert or set aside the enterprise bargaining agreement, those procedures are final. What council did was then express its own view and place it on the public record. Reader: With reckless disregard for the truth and with deliberate intent to deceive. Norman Swan: It’s still OK for the University of NSW to replicate data, publish data that don’t exist, do an experiment later on which confirms the earlier data and with the excuse that I was sick, my lap top broke down, or whatever. You just find the excuses that Bruce Hall used, some of which may or may not be fine, I mean he was sick, apparently his lap top was [broken], there were all sorts of mitigating circumstances apparently. But you come up with that same set of excuses and you can get away with it with the University of NSW. I don’t think there’s many other universities in the world where you could, but you can get away with it at the University of NSW. So we’ve lost a Vice Chancellor, we’ve lost the Dean of Medicine, both of whom were very competent people, and Bruce Hall is still there. Sharon Carleton: The NH&MRC;’s Professor Warwick Anderson. Warwick Anderson: What we need to put in place are two things, I think. As much prevention as possible: being from the medical end of research our prevention is always better than treatment and cure. I think that Australia really has to think strongly now about whether we need a national system such has been introduced in some other countries, notably Northern Europe. But one thing we have done in the new code is spelt out much more clearly what the university should have in place internally and that hasn’t been well spelt out because I think we got a little entangled with the enterprise bargaining matter so we will be doing that. That’ll have some teeth if the universities adopt it themselves but certainly if ARC and NH&MRC; adopt it then this will be an obligation on those who want to get funds from those bodies to set up such a system. Sharon Carleton: Too late of course from Dr Clara He. Clara He: Australia is my adopted country and I love the country, I love the culture, I love the people, I love everything, I love the opportunity the country provided me, I’m very grateful. I always wish I can do something good to return this new society, new country which I adopted and love so much. The future? Yes, I still believe I have knowledge, I have both hands, I’m still not too old, I should be able to rebuild a life but how successfully I would do I believe that’s beyond me. I think regardless of how much I will try, how much struggle I will go through, I believe the end, that final outcome I think I am facing failure. I will probably never be able to build my career. I have no future. Robyn Williams: The fate of the whistleblowers on Radio National, this is a Science Show special looking at how universities and research institutions treat those who have the courage to blow the whistle when they see their colleagues committing scientific fraud. Back to Sharon Carleton. Sharon Carleton: It’s cold comfort to know Australia’s not alone in the business of dubious science. Reader: Biologist, Bruce Boler resigned to protest the acceptance by the Environmental Protection Agency of a developer-financed study that concluded that wetlands give off more pollutants than they absorb, that golf courses and other developments would be better for the environment. Frederic Whitehurst, a chemist who was the FBI’s top bomb residue expert, was singled out for retaliation. He refused to doctor his reports to support the FBI’s urea nitrate bomb theory as the cause for the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing. His complaint triggered an overhaul of the FBI’s world-renowned crime lab and he settled a lawsuit against the FBI for more than $1.16 million. Sharon Carleton: The Science Show first went to air with Robyn Williams in 1975. In those days, the contraceptive pill was the talk of the town and who better to talk than an internationally renowned expert and advisor to the World Health Organisation? Michael Briggs was the Foundation Dean of Science at one of our newest universities. Robyn Williams: And it’s time for the Science Show . This week science and society. Hello, I’m Robyn Williams. I think it’s fair to say that there’s as much confusion these days in the minds of both men and women about the safety and efficiency of contraceptives as there were say, five or ten years ago. And I’m not surprised. Where do you get the information and how do you make sense of it? Our old friend Dr Michael Briggs, who’s a world authority on the pill’s biochemistry, has just got some very interesting results from two of his long term studies. I understand that you’ve been doing your own work in testing with various subjects, if you like, what happens when they take added vitamins as they are taking oral contraceptives and others who are taking things that they think are added vitamins. What happened? Michael Briggs: What we did was, we took a group of girls and in a double blind fashion they received either three months of a vitamin preparation or three months of an inner placebo, and then for the second three months of the trial they switched over to the alternative product. And analysis of the results which we’ve just completed, does show quite a significant improvement, in improvement of skin and hair condition, reduced number of days of depression and reduced number of days of general illness due to things like the common cold. Robyn Williams: Well, have you got sufficient evidence to make any kind of comment about what you think might be the relationship between the extent of hypertension and the level of oestrogen in the pill that women are taking? Michael Briggs: What we have got is a clinical study in which we had a control group of women who were fitted with an IUD and their blood pressure was recorded regularly and there was no particular change in this group. Now we had a matched group who were taking the 50 microgram oestrogen pill and we found that over the same period of time they all showed a gradual increase in blood pressure. Robyn Williams: Thank you very much Michael Briggs. Professor Michael Briggs is Dean of Applied Sciences at Deakin University in Geelong. Reader: The Sunday Times, September, 1986. The pill – Professor’s safety tests were faked. Research into the long-term side effects of a new generation of contraceptive pills was fabricated. Michael Briggs’ deceptions put a question mark over safety checks on pills being taken by up to 2 million women in Britain and 10 million worldwide. Sharon Carleton: Michael Briggs’ supposed research was funded by two drug companies that paid him several million dollars. Over 20 years he’d published more than 100 papers and reports on cardiovascular disease and the oral contraceptive – none was in a peer review journal. But in 1982 rumours started to circulate. Trials of contraceptives, which he said took place at Deakin University, never had any women recruited to them. The experiments on beagle dogs, again supposed to have been undertaken at Deakin, simply hadn’t occurred. The science department only had rats and mice at that time and the biochemical test results he published were pure imagination. Dr James Rossiter, 8 years a member of the council of Deakin University and chairman of its ethics committee sent a pile of incriminating documents to the Chancellor, Mr. Justice Austin Asche. Not believing their star recruit could be up to such chicanery, Justice Asche refused to set up an enquiry. Jim Rossiter then made a formal complaint to the Vice Chancellor, Professor Fred Jevons. First off, Michael Briggs managed to thwart a formal inquiry by appealing to the university visitor. This is a wonderfully archaic position handed down from the middle ages. The visitor has the final say in university disputes - and this time he refused an enquiry on a legal technicality. The evidence of fraud continued to mount and Dr Rossiter, now joined by two colleagues, reframed the complaint and tried again. Michael Briggs resigned. Dr Jim Rossiter. Jim Rossiter: I think the worst aspect of it was probably having to have continual unpleasant remarks made to me, being treated as a pariah by some people who I had to have contact with and sometimes had to work with. And the fact that my personal status and my personal work suffered as a result of something where I was simply trying to expose somebody who was doing dishonest things. There were senior people at the university who were attacking me seriously; one Professor there said in a meeting of several senior academics, that in his opinion as a psychologist Jim Rossiter was of unsound mind. Sharon Carleton: Were you ever threatened? Jim Rossiter: Yes I was. When it became well known I received quite a large number of telephone calls during the night threatening my life. Not a voice that I recognised, it certainly wasn’t Briggs himself, I would have recognised his voice I think. Sharon Carleton: Michael Briggs may have escaped punishment but not exposure. There was a most fortuitous burglary or two of Dr Rossiter’s consulting rooms in Geelong just months after Briggs fled to Spain. While nothing was stolen, Jim Rossiter believes his extensive file on the Briggs affair had been photocopied. Jim Rossiter: Well, I was certainly relieved that the whole thing would then come out. Somebody walked into the office of The Sunday Times Insight team in London and put a large cardboard box on the counter and said: I think you’ll find this interesting, and walked out. And it contained a very large amount of information, including all my private files on the Briggs affair. Sharon Carleton: I wonder why they went to The Sunday Times in London and not to a newspaper here in Australia? Jim Rossiter: I think because this was an international situation. The drug firm for which Briggs had been working was a German firm; the firm which had been very seriously damaged by all the publicity about one contraceptive being much safer than another was a Dutch firm. And I think that the decision was taken that it should go onto the international stage. Sharon Carleton: Michael Briggs died of liver failure believed to be the result of alcoholism months after The Sunday Times exclusive. A committee of enquiry was finally set up at Deakin University but it took two years to find that Briggs was a swindler of the worst kind. Almost twenty years after the Briggs affair Deakin finally did the right thing by Jim Rossiter and awarded him an honorary doctorate of the university in recognition of his work in scientific ethics and in particular in exposing Michael Briggs. John Talent: I think fraud takes place where there’s very little chance of getting caught and if there is a cover up institutions or individuals are very, very slow to blow the whistle, refuse to blow the whistle or do anything about someone that’s accused: I n that sort of situation fraud will flourish. Robyn Williams: John Talent from Macquarie University in Sydney is a Professor of Palaeobiology. For years he’s been working on the prehistory of Asia, piecing together the movements of 35 islands that slowly merged to form the world’s largest continent, piecing together data from hundreds of other scientists. But it seems that data from one of these scientists, a geologist from India, doesn’t fit. His work turns the picture upside down leading Talent to suspect fraud on a vast scale. Sharon Carleton: Film Australia made a documentary in 1991 on the extravagant fraud perpetrated by an Indian geologist. The Professor’s New Clothes was narrated by Robyn Williams. Robyn Williams: The accused is Dr V J Gupta, Professor of Geology at Panjab University. He is India’s most celebrated fossil scientist, for 25 years stunning the geological world with intriguing fossil finds that turned the accepted picture of the Himalayas on its head. In 1989, writing in the British journal Nature, Talent accused Gupta of fraud. Talent’s claim is that Gupta’s fossils are spurious: either bought, stolen or received as gifts. Sharon Carleton: Vishwa Jit Gupta was a shiny round-faced man with a penchant for big cigars and flamboyant coats with ermine collars. He travelled the world sharing the knowledge of his unique discoveries. It wasn’t until 1987, when Professor John Talent went to Paris, that he concluded that Gupta’s fraud was not just one or two papers – it was vast. With a few hours to kill before his flight back to Sydney, Professor Talent stopped by a local rock shop – there he found some interesting fossils from Morocco. He bought a handful and caught his flight. Professor Talent remembered having seen photographs of these exact same fossils in a Gupta paper - except Gupta’s identical specimens were supposedly from the Himalayas, not Morocco. It was proof positive of fraud. Should the Australian out this Indian impostor? Professor John Talent. John Talent: I wanted my Indian colleagues to do it. I’d started on a major project with colleagues at the Siberian branch of the Academy of Science in Novosibirsk, Siberia, looking at biogeography for a 100 million year time slice back in the deep past but we had this spurious data from Gupta. So I finally decided in the beginning of 1987 that something had to be put into print, preferably obscurely. I targeted a conference that was being held in Calgary and prepared a presentation there, which included material from Morocco and material that was in one of the plates in a paper by Gupta. And I was able to show these simultaneously on the screen, so the fossils in the two presentations looked exactly the same, and Gupta was in the front row. One of my colleagues jumped up and said: Well, how do you explain having exactly the same fossils in two localities 600 kilometres apart? Now if that isn’t a miracle I don’t know what is. Gupta stormed out of the room and he came back waving his fists and obviously wanted to punch me up but the crowd, there were about 250 there, just closed in and he couldn’t get near me. He did this three times and then he demanded from the organisers a list of everyone that was at the meeting and he wanted a copy of my manuscript, but fortunately the director of the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt said, Do you want me to publish it? And I said, Yes. And somehow Nature got onto it and they commissioned a three-page paper from me commenting on the significance of this massive exercise in academic fraud. When I say massive, it was seven books and a total of 458 publications. Sharon Carleton: You mean to say that every single one of those publications was inaccurate? John Talent: Well, some of them are spurious from end to end. Others, it seems as though when he had something that had been halfway decent he rose to the challenge of polluting it in some way. There were 126 co-authors, conned by this enterprise over 28 years. Sharon Carleton: What happened to you as the whistleblower? Were there any dire consequences or were you a hero for having done this? John Talent: Oh, I don’t know about a hero. There were no particularly dire consequences, just a few death threats. The people who were hurt most were in India. His technician said at morning tea in Gupta’s department, Gupta wasn’t present, he said, ‘I know where practically everything came from, I know where he hooked material out of books and so on’. He said, ‘I’ve got a story to tell, I’m going to tell it’, and the following night he was killed in a hit and run accident. Gupta offered monies to anyone who would inflict grievous bodily harm on my honorary authors of the original monograph on this published by the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt and a colleague at the Geological Survey in India took a bus three and a half hours to inform them, these two, to be very careful when and where they went. And about ten days later the mother of one of them was skittled in a hit and run accident, both legs, both arms broken, eight or ten ribs broken and she went into immediate senile decline after this traumatic experience. Sharon Carleton: So what happened to Professor Gupta? John Talent: He was sidelined, he wanted to teach his old courses but they wouldn’t let him do it and they gave him courses in engineering and ground water geology, which don’t have the sort of prominence they should have in universities. And so he was out on a limb until he finally retired in May 2004. Sharon Carleton: And what did you learn from all of this, how do you feel about it all? Would you do it again, would you do it the same way? What did you learn from it? John Talent: I learned it was an unpleasant process. Would I do it again? I guess I would and I guess I would do so trying to do it surreptitiously without much noise but enough that people in the know would be able to quietly deal with this problem. Sharon Carleton: Until such time as Australia’s whistleblower legislation is updated and a culture created of supporting those who refuse to accept flawed science, the media will have a role to play. I asked Norman Swan if he was looking forward to his next case of scientific fraud. Norman Swan: I will never do a case of scientific fraud ever again. I’ve said this publicly and I’ve said it a couple of times before - I am never going to do another one ever again. And the reason for that is just the failure of institutional responses. If the University of NSW can get away with something like this – what is the point? Somebody else can do it, some young buck can come along and do them but, you know, I’m not going to do another one because I just don’t think that the institutions in this country have responded seriously to this. Robyn Williams: Scientific Whistleblowers was written and presented by Sharon Carleton and produced by David Fisher. You also heard John Cleary, Nick Franklin, Paul Griffiths, Don Kaufman and Jo Upham. Guests on this program:Mr Chris Wheeler Dr Phil Vardy Gail Vardy Dr Norman Swan Dr Clara He Prof Jeremy Davis Prof Warwick Anderson Dr James Rossiter Prof John Talent Presenter: Sharon Carleton Producer: David Fisher |
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