Baltimore, Maryland -- The U.S. Attorney’s Office said here last week it would not prosecute a researcher for fraud in the “David Baltimore case,” saying it would be better if the matter were settled by scientists than by a lay jury.
The office had been looking into charges that Thereza Imanishi-Kari, an assistant professor of immunology at Tufts University, made false statements to the government about research done under a grant from the National Institutes of Health. David Baltimore, a Nobel Laureate who was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when the research was done and is now a professor at Rockefeller University, was an author of the paper produced from the research. Mr. Baltimore had not been accused in the matter.
The results of the research in question were published in 1986 in the journal Cell. The paper concluded that a gene transplanted into mice had had a far greater influence on the animals’ immune systems than scientists had expected.
A dispute over the paper began shortly after it was published. Margot O’Toole, a post-doctoral researcher who worked in Ms. Imanishi-Kari’s laboratory, questioned the paper’s validity. Later, Ms. O’Toole charged that Ms. Imanishi-Kari had not done some of the experiments that she said she had performed.
The dispute triggered a wave of Congressional interest in research fraud and has continued through two university investigations, multiple Congressional hearings, and three government investigations, making it the longest-running active dispute over scientific misconduct.
The decision by the U.S. Attorney not to prosecute the case, made after two years of considering the evidence, left unresolved an investigation by the Office of Scientific Integrity at the National Institutes of Health.
Lyle Bivens, director of the Office of Scientific Integrity Review at the Public Health Service, which in the past has double-checked investigations by the Office of Scientific Integrity, said the case would be resolved by new procedures that are being established for investigating scientific misconduct in projects financed by the Public Health Service. All of the research agencies in the Department of Health and Human Services are part of the Public Health Service.
A 1991 draft report by the Office of Scientific Integrity found that Ms. Imanishi-Kari had fabricated some of her data. The report said it was unclear if the experiments had ever been done.
Under the new procedures, Ms. Imanishi-Kari would be offered a hearing if integrity-office investigators found that their original conclusion held up. At such a hearing, she could dispute the government’s evidence and might also be given the chance to confront her accusers.
Officials at the U.S. Attorney’s office said they had not prosecuted the case in part because they did not think it likely that a jury would find Ms. Imanishi-Kari guilty. Geoffrey Garinther, the Assistant U.S. Attorney handling the case, said he had confidence in the Secret Service report indicating that Ms. Imanishi-Kari had created documents supporting experimental results long after the experiments were supposed to have been done. But he said a jury might not believe Ms. Imanishi-Kari was deliberately misleading the government.
“If scientists haven’t been able to make up their mind over six years about the underlying validity of the paper,” Mr. Garinther said, “then I don’t think we could have proved it beyond a reasonable doubt before a jury of lay persons in a week.”
Mr. Garinther said he hoped the matter would be settled by scientists. If an administrative hearing were held, the administrator holding the hearing could appoint scientific experts to assist him.
Mr. Baltimore and Ms. Imanishi-Kari’s lawyer, Bruce A. Singal, both said the prosecutor’s decision had vindicated Ms. Imanishi-Kari. Mr. Baltimore said last week that the investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s office had been more thorough than the one conducted at the NIH.
“I do not know of another forum in which such a judgment could be made and be more certain,” he said. “They found insufficient evidence to prosecute her. You can’t ever in life know exactly what somebody has done. You can only know what the evidence is.”
Mr. Baltimore said he would write to Cell asking its editors to withdraw his earlier retraction of the paper.
Mr. Garinther questioned Mr. Baltimore’s response. “Mr. Baltimore’s reaction is a mistake,” he said. “He is placing too much weight on our decision not to prosecute.”
Mr. Garinther said he was afraid that, if the case had been brought before a jury, what has been called Ms. Imanishi-Kari’s “sloppy-science defense” might have worked. Ms. Imanishi-Kari has acknowledged that she kept poor records and may have made some mistakes in pulling together her data for the investigation.
Mr. Baltimore responded that the “sloppy-science defense is not a defense. It is what really happened. I saw it happening.”
Mr. Baltimore said he had asked Cell to publish his retraction of the paper after reviewing the draft report by the Office of Scientific Integrity that he said had been based largely on evidence gathered by the Secret Service. The service’s experts in forgery reviewed the inks and paper from research notebooks and tapes from laboratory machines known as gamma counters. The experts concluded that the notebooks had not been created when Ms. Imanishi-Kari said they had.
Mr. Baltimore’s retraction stated that he would like to withdraw the paper until questions about the data supporting it were resolved. A 14-page report by an independent forensic expert who was retained by Ms. Imanishi-Kari’s lawyer to examine the notebooks, plus the decision by the U.S. Attorney’s office not to prosecute, has now resolved those questions, he said.
The independent consultant, Albert H. Lyter, found that the conclusions of the Secret Service report were erroneous. Mr. Singal, Ms. Imanishi-Kari’s lawyer, said that for years his client did not have access to her notebooks, until the U.S. Attorney’s office released them last year. Because the color of the paper and the laboratory tapes was an issue in the investigation, he said, copies of them were insufficient for Ms. Imanishi-Kari’s defense. “When powerful government institutions are going to make serious accusations,” he said, “fundamental fairness dictates they give those who are accused the evidence so they can respond. That’s particularly important in scientific investigations.”