Scientific Grants, and Corruption

There was an interesting article in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal about a Cornell University doctor, Kyriakie Sarafoglou, who, as a newly-appointed "research subject advocate", objected to what she saw as a diversion of National Institutes of Health (NIH) research money to treat regular hospital patients. In fact, as far as she could tell, the research was merely a ruse: the money was being for any number of other purposes outside the scope of the approved research projects. She eventually filed suit, and in June, Cornell's Weill Medical College agreed to settle the government's charges for $4.4 million, without admitting wrongdoing.

This story brought back memories of when I was a postdoctoral assistant at Arizona State University (ASU) in the late 1980's. I too fought back at what I saw as corruption, but it was of a different sort: the emergence of the scientist as administrator - an administrator who appeared to no longer have the ability to properly understand, much less do, the science. In fact, it was the graduate students and postdocs who had to teach each other the skills of the trade: the "job" of the "lead scientist" was to harrass grant reviewers at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Washington, D.C.

In both cases, it was easy to understand why the corruption occurred. It's expensive to run a teaching hospital, funds have to come from somewhere. I can see why hospital administrators and the research faculty who work there might have to get creative with the financing. Similarly, the ASU faculty had expensive electron microscope facilities to maintain, and where else was the money going to come from but Washington, D.C., and how do you guarantee your access to it unless you concentrate your energies there? In both cases, however, the purposes of science were being subverted for the purposes of obtaining grant money: the exact opposite of why the money is supposed to be there in the first place! There is a difference of degree though: Sarafoglou's problem was larger, since NIH health science grants tend to be much larger than what NSF doles out to physical scientists.

It had never occurred to me that the higher one looked in the Pyramid of Science, the more people of lesser ability one might be likely to find: that's not how things should work! But under some circumstances, particularly at large U.S. state universities, where the competition for money is strong, the higher you look, the more gladhanding dummies you find. Similarly, Sarafoglou had probably thought she left behind petty corruption when she closed her medical practice in Greece in order to become an assistant professor at an acclaimed U.S. medical school. You learn something new all the time!

In any event, after leaving ASU for a second postdoctoral position (that also went badly for different reasons), I left academia entirely for consulting air pollution engineering. Oddly enough, there seems to be less corruption overall in the private sector, probably because the race for money is less brutal. And the expectations tend to be less exalted, which means targets can be more easily met without twisting people into pretzels. Regarding Sarfoglou, for her own good, she had to leave Cornell for the University of Minnesota. I hope she is happy there!

Anyway, there's a lot of sham research out there, which is quite unfortunate for the progress of science. Watch those scientists: underneath those lab coats, they might be surprisingly corrupt! All understandable, of course, but still lamentable!