An Unwelcome Discovery

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BlankOctober 22, 2006

An Unwelcome Discovery

By JENEEN INTERLANDI

On a rainy afternoon in June, Poehlman stood before a federal judge in the

United States District Court in downtown Burlington, Vt. His sentencing hearing

had dragged on for more than four hours, and Poehlman, dressed in a black suit,

remained silent while the lawyers argued over the appropriate sentence for his

transgressions. Now was his chance to speak. A year earlier, in the same

courthouse, Poehlman pleaded guilty to lying on a federal grant application and

admitted to fabricating more than a decade’s worth of scientific data on

obesity, menopause and aging, much of it while conducting clinical research as a

tenured faculty member at the University of Vermont. He presented fraudulent

data in lectures and in published papers, and he used this data to obtain

millions of dollars in federal grants from the National Institutes of Health — a

crime subject to as many as five years in federal prison. Poehlman’s admission

of guilt came after more than five years during which he denied the charges

against him, lied under oath and tried to discredit his accusers. By the time

Poehlman came clean, his case had grown into one of the most expansive cases of

scientific fraud in U.S. history.

“I need to start out by apologizing,” Poehlman said now, standing at the lectern

before the judge. Speaking quickly and stammering occasionally, he apologized to

friends and former colleagues, some of whom were listening in the back of the

courtroom. He apologized to his mother, who sat in the front row, crying. And he

apologized to Walter DeNino, the former protégé who turned him in, who was also

sitting in the courtroom, several rows back on the prosecution’s side.

“I have wanted to say I’m sorry for five years,” Poehlman said, without turning

around to face DeNino. “I want to make it very clear I am remorseful. I accept

the responsibility. There’s no way that I can turn back the clock. And I’m not

that individual that I was years ago.”

Before his fall from grace, Poehlman oversaw a lab where nearly a dozen students

and postdoctoral researchers carried out his projects. His research earned him

recognition among his peers and invitations to speak at conferences around the

world. And he made nearly $140,000, one of the top salaries at the University of

Vermont. All of that began to change six years ago, when DeNino took his

concerns about anomalies in Poehlman’s data to university officials. The

subsequent investigation — a collaboration among the University of Vermont, the

Office of Research Integrity (which is within the Department of Health and Human

Services) and the United States Department of Justice — uncovered fraudulent

research that stretched back through almost half of Poehlman’s career. The

revelations led to the retraction or correction of 10 scientific papers, and

Poehlman was banned forever from receiving public research money. He was only

the second scientist in the United States to face criminal prosecution for

falsifying research data.

At 50, with his career in ruins and his reputation destroyed, Poehlman could

only hope to avoid one final humiliation: becoming the first researcher

sentenced to prison for scientific misconduct. Citing the nearly $200,000

Poehlman had paid in restitution, his attorneys had asked the judge to sentence

him to supervised probation. “I am hoping that you can consider this sentence

fair and just to me, as well as the community,” Poehlman pleaded, without “a

sentence of incarceration or imprisonment.”

Full story

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/magazine/22sciencefraud.html?_r=1 & oref=slogin & \

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