The professor at the center of an acrimonious dispute between the University of California at San Diego and the University of Southern California says he made clear to UC for months that he intended to switch institutions.
“It was not a surprise,” Paul S. Aisen, a professor of neurology, said of his defection in June to USC. “As soon as I started to think about affiliating with another institution, I discussed it with UCSD,” Dr. Aisen said in an interview with The Chronicle. Those talks began “in late 2014,” he said.
UC-San Diego, however, describes itself as blindsided by Dr. Aisen’s attempt to move his multimillion-dollar Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study and staff to USC. “USC engaged in months of negotiations with Dr. Aisen as if the ADCS were Dr. Aisen’s personal property, without any attempt to communicate with UC-San Diego in advance,” said Gary S. Firestein, dean of translational medicine at UC-San Diego.
That shock and anger touched off a rare court fight between research universities over control of grants and study data. In the weeks since his departure from UC-San Diego, Dr. Aisen has largely replicated his Alzheimer’s program at USC, bringing over much of his staff and a major private grant. But a state court so far has blocked his attempt to take along a key $55-million grant from the National Institutes of Health.
The unusual intensity of the dispute between Dr. Aisen and his former employer reflects the amount of money at stake. The case also demonstrates the ambitions of USC, which just raised $4 billion in a fund-raising campaign and is looking to expand, said J. Daniel Sharp, a private lawyer hired by UC-San Diego. “So they were just going to take it, and that’s the way they’re behaving,” he said. “If they have to pay some damages to UC, if they break some things, they have the money to pay for it. That’s what is going on.”
USC, however, has described its interest in Dr. Aisen’s program as based primarily on a desire to advance the science. “Our investment in establishing the USC Alzheimer’s Therapeutic Research Institute under Dr. Aisen’s leadership was not premised on the transfer of any particular grant, but on our commitment to understanding and solving diseases that affect the human brain,” USC said in a statement attributed to Randolph W. Hall, its vice president for research.
In his Chronicle interview, Dr. Aisen disputed UC-San Diego on several key points, including his level of transparency and his motives for moving to USC. Yet he affirmed one central miscalculation behind the bad blood: He had long assumed he would be able to take the NIH grant with him to USC, without ever actually discussing that with UC-San Diego.
“Since it was all based on work done entirely by my research team, and neither supported financially nor with significant intellectual input from the university, I assumed that the grant funding would all move with me,” he said.
That turned out not to be the case. The NIH awards its grants to institutions, not to individual scientists. And while an institution that loses a researcher typically gives permission for grant money to leave with that researcher, UC-San Diego has said that’s a courtesy not typically extended in the case of very large multi-investigator grants.
A Meeting in May
Dr. Aisen learned of UC-San Diego’s insistence on that point during a showdown meeting over the Memorial Day weekend, touching off a series of events that escalated a disappointing staff departure into a continuing feud.
It began that Friday, May 22, when Dr. Aisen hosted a meeting with his staff at UC-San Diego’s Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study. At the meeting, he said he had “become very serious about the possibility of joining the faculty at USC” and replicating the Alzheimer’s program there.
For months and even years beforehand, Dr. Aisen said, he had been discussing with UC-San Diego administrators two key obstacles to expanding his program, one of the nation’s biggest studies of patients with Alzheimer’s disease.
One problem was UC-San Diego’s structural inability to promptly handle his program’s hundreds of subcontractors — a result of the program’s need to track patients at some 70 clinics in the United States and Canada. The second problem, he said, was university personnel rules that limited how much he could pay his staff.
Such complaints represent “common bureaucratic headaches” in large organizations, said Mr. Sharp, who was designated by UC-San Diego to speak on its behalf. And UC-San Diego did eventually meet the “modest percentage” increases in staff salaries sought by Dr. Aisen, Mr. Sharp said. But, he conceded, the university didn’t make that decision until after the turmoil in May.
After Dr. Aisen’s Friday meeting with his staff, some attendees reported details to the chairman of the neurosciences department, William C. Mobley, who asked to meet the next day with Dr. Aisen. According to Dr. Aisen’s account, Dr. Mobley told him that his comments at the staff meeting were regarded as an announcement of his resignation, and that the university therefore was cutting off his computer access and had prepared a news release to announce his departure.
“I was completely taken aback by this,” Dr. Aisen said. He said he had made no final decision about leaving UC-San Diego; he meant only to emphasize to his staff the difficulties he faced in resolving the administrative and salary issues.
“Nothing had changed,” Dr. Aisen said, recalling the Friday staff meeting. “I hadn’t made any final decision, and I had been talking about all the issues and where we were having difficulty finding progress with UCSD right along.”
A ‘Pledge of Loyalty’
But Mr. Sharp said that Dr. Aisen’s departure for USC had already been arranged. Dr. Aisen received a formal offer from USC on the Wednesday before the staff meeting, Mr. Sharp said, and was in the process of announcing it to colleagues when UC-San Diego cut his electronic access to the volumes of study data he hoped to take with him.
Mr. Sharp produced an email exchange sent the morning of May 22 between Dr. Aisen and UC-San Diego’s dean of medicine, David A. Brenner, who pledged to provide Dr. Aisen with whatever resources he needed to “develop the world’s premier center for Alzheimer’s research.” Dr. Aisen, writing back, said his program “requires a streamlined, transparent, efficient, flexible environment, and a financially secure foundation. This still does not seem feasible at UC. An affiliation with USC (as an operationally independent institute based in San Diego) is our best path.”
USC had gone so far as to meet with the landlord and check out the wiring of the facility it planned to use as the site of Dr. Aisen’s relocated Alzheimer’s program, Mr. Sharp said. They “were planning to take over the whole operation,” he said of USC.
And Dr. Aisen, in the Chronicle interview, acknowledged that his plan at the time of the staff meeting was for “an orderly transition once I made the decision to leave.”
“That transition would occur over a period of months, and actually I was thinking specifically about September as a possibility,” Dr. Aisen said. “And that would give us time for all the details around the transition, including letters of relinquishment, but also dealing with specimens and equipment.”
In the tussle for control of the study data, UC-San Diego presented Dr. Aisen with what he called a “pledge of loyalty.” As a proposed condition for restoring Dr. Aisen’s electronic access to his study data, Dr. Mobley gave him a statement to sign that promised not to move the data outside the control of UC-San Diego. “I understand that I owe the university a duty of loyalty, and may not act against the university’s interests,” the proposed statement said.
Disagreement over the statement reflected the broader dispute. Dr. Aisen said he couldn’t comprehend such a statement and refused to sign it, despite his concern for the patients whose conditions he needed to monitor. He said his access was restored several days later, after he asked the NIH to intervene. He said he then changed the billing for a cloud-based remote-storage version of the data so that UC-San Diego could still have access but no longer block him.
“It was a terrible period of time that put me in a very uncomfortable position regarding my responsibilities to the patients in the studies,” Dr. Aisen said.
Mr. Sharp, however, said UC-San Diego had been justified in cutting Dr. Aisen’s electronic access after learning of his imminent move to USC.
“The notion that there was any risk to the data is nonsense,” he said. “That’s pure nonsense that he has invented after the fact to try and justify what he did, which was to take control of data and move it with him abruptly to USC,” he said. Mr. Sharp denied that the NIH had played any role in persuading UC-San Diego to restore Dr. Aisen’s computer access.
Investing in Alzheimer’s
Moreover, despite his subsequent claims, Dr. Aisen never told UC-San Diego about his job negotiations with USC before the Memorial Day weekend, Mr. Sharp said. “He has a lot of revisionist history to this,” he said.
From UC-San Diego’s perspective, Dr. Aisen had long wanted to leave because he would get a raise — $500,000 annually for five years at USC, instead of less than $400,000 at UC-San Diego — and would be known as the founding director of the USC Alzheimer’s program rather than as a successor director at UC-San Diego, Mr. Sharp said.
While the court system is still evaluating its initial ruling that the NIH grant should remain with UC-San Diego, that amount represents only about a third of the budget of the Alzheimer’s program led by Dr. Aisen. A major private partner, Eli Lilly and Company, announced last week it was moving its $70-million investment from UC-San Diego to Dr. Aisen’s new home, the USC Alzheimer’s Therapeutic Research Institute. Most staff members of the UC-San Diego program — which had about 65 or 70 full-time workers — also have made the move to USC, Dr. Aisen said.
Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia, affecting an estimated 44 million people worldwide, with the number expected to reach 75 million by 2030 and 135 million by 2050, fueling both public and private expenditures to treat it. Dr. Aisen has won acclaim in his field by concentrating on finding new models for clinical trials that can tackle the disease by treating it as early as possible.
UC-San Diego recruited Dr. Aisen from Georgetown University in 2007. It would have been happy to let Dr. Aisen leave, if he had been forthright about his plans and didn’t try to take with him data accumulated at UC-San Diego, Mr. Sharp said. “They were willing to send him on his way with good wishes,” he said. “There’s a right way and a wrong way for somebody to make an academic transition.”
Dr. Aisen said, however, he would do nothing differently. “Every decision I made was in fact made with the interests of the patients and the science in mind,” he said. “Even looking back at all the difficulties I’ve had, in the face of this lawsuit, I don’t think that my decisions were mistaken.”
Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.
