Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.
A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.
A former medical professor at the University of Vermont who studied aging, menopause, and obesity has agreed to plead guilty to lying on federal research-grant applications, to pay a $180,000 penalty, and to be barred for life from receiving federal grants.
Eric T. Poehlman, the former professor, faces up to five years in prison and has agreed to submit numerous letters of retraction to journals in which articles affected by his misconduct have appeared.
The settlement, announced on Thursday by the U.S. attorney’s office in Burlington, Vt., concludes a case described by the director of the federal Office of Research Integrity as the most serious in nearly 20 years. Criminal charges in research-fraud cases are rare, and the lifetime ban is the first of its kind.
According to federal prosecutors, Dr. Poehlman submitted 17 grant applications with false and fabricated data from 1992 to 2000. He made up data on several topics, including his studies of how women’s metabolism changes during menopause, how aging affects metabolism, and how hormone-replacement therapy affects obesity in older women.
For instance, according to prosecutors, in one journal article he said he had tested 35 women and then retested the same women six years later. In fact, the professor fabricated the results for all but 3 of the 35 women.
Dr. Poehlman’s career began to unravel in 2000, when a laboratory technician accused him of misconduct. The technician, Walter F. DeNino, had recently graduated from the University of Vermont when he took a job working for the professor.
Mr. DeNino, now a postbaccalaureate student in medicine at Columbia University, said Dr. Poehlman had given him a database to explore. “I generated a report, and he wasn’t happy with the results,” Mr. DeNino said on Thursday. The professor then said he would check the report, and Mr. DeNino later reran the same statistical tests. “They were drastically different,” he said. “The sample size was the same, but the trends were reversed, and if they weren’t reversed, they were now highly significant. Within hours I started suspecting that something was wrong.”
Mr. DeNino then began his own sleuthing. He said he visited the lab at night to compare the database with the actual medical records of the people in the study. He found that the data had been changed.
“I was definitely scared,” he said. “I spoke to a couple of senior collaborators and communicated my suspicions to them. And I found out that other people doubted his work or actually knew of fabrications in the past.”
Mr. DeNino said he then confronted Dr. Poehlman in writing, asking him explain the discrepancies between the original records and the database. After not being satisfied with the explanations, the lab technician formally accused him of misconduct.
That led to a lengthy university inquiry and several years of federal investigation. Now, Mr. DeNino said, he is relieved that the saga has ended. “I’ve dealt with a lot of documents and a lot of questions from lawyers,” he said. As part of the settlement, Dr. Poehlman agreed to pay $16,000 in legal fees for the former assistant.
According to federal officials, Dr. Poehlman also destroyed evidence of the fabrications, presented false testimony, and persuaded others to provide false documents to investigators. In total, the professor requested $11.6-million in federal research grants, often with fabricated research data in the “preliminary studies” portion of the applications, prosecutors said. The National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded the professor about $2.9-million in grants based on applications with fabricated data, according to prosecutors.
Telephone messages left for Dr. Poehlman’s lawyers in Vermont were not returned on Thursday. After leaving Vermont, he worked as a researcher in Montreal, but he has since left that position as well.
Chris B. Pascal, director of the Office of Research Integrity, described the case as a “massive fabrication.” He said prosecutors were pleased with the university’s response “but wanted to send a signal that the individual scientist is accountable.”
Frances E. Carr, vice president for research at Vermont, said university professors and administrators were saddened by the charges but encouraged that the investigative process had “reached the appropriate conclusion.”
She said that Mr. DeNino’s coming forward proved that “no matter where you are in the UVM community, your voice is valid.”
“That’s the positive on this unfortunate situation,” she said.
