Feder, Stewart Rapped for Letter on NIH Stationery

Science & Government Report 1 March 1995

The following article appeared in the 1 March 1995 issue of Science & Government Report.

Feder, Stewart Rapped for Letter on NIH Stationery

In a sparkling display of asininity, the National Institutes of Health has issued an "Official Reprimand" to its long-troublesome duo, Ned Feder and Walter Stewart, accusing them of violating a 1993 order to refrain from pursuing scientific misconduct. Their offense: writing a letter on NIH stationery.

"This action is a flagrant violation of my directive to you that you are not to use government resources for activities related to scientific misconduct," they were advised in a letter dated February 15 from L. Earl Laurence, Acting Deputy Director and Executive Officer of their workplace, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive Kidney Diseases (NIDDK).

Though reprimanding them only for the use of "NIDDK letterhead," Laurence's letter raised the possibility of other transgressions: "If you used other NIDDK resources, including xeroxing facilities," Laurence warned, "this would be in further violation."

The basis of the reprimand was their use of NIDDK stationery in sending a disputed report and a peppery letter on the Gallo case to Kenneth J. Ryan, Chairman of the Commission on Research Integrity of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Commission, appointed by HHS Secretary Donna Shalala, was assigned to gather information and recommend policies for promoting rectitude in the Department's research activities.

As it turns out, however, Laurence had given the pair written permission last October to accept an invitation to testify before the Ryan Commission. Permission came in a letter from Laurence to Feder and Stewart stating: "It is the practice of [NIDDK] to make the members of the staff available to any duly constituted commission of the Department of Health and Human Services."

In the course of their appearance, in November, they were asked by a member to supply any additional information that they thought might be useful to the Commission's work. The material that drew the reprimand, Feder and Stewart insist, was sent to the Commission in response to that request, with a covering letter on NIDDK stationery.

Seasoned masters of bureaucratic dodgem, Feder and Stewart sent a memo to Laurence last week requesting withdrawal of the reprimand. "The situation," they wrote, "is truly Kafaesque: we forward information on the Gallo fraud -- a major scientific fraud that affects the public health. We receive, not a response to the scientific fraud, but a complaint that we used the wrong letterhead." They also cited various statutes and regulations requiring federal employees to report wrongdoing.

Though NIH is stewing about Feder, Stewart, and the Gallo report, Commission Chairman Ryan, a Professor at the Harvard Medical School, apparently finds the document of some interest. Regarding a copy sent to him by a Feder-Stewart ally, Serge Lang, Professor of Mathematics at Yale, prior to the dispatch of the Feder-Stewart copy, Ryan responded with gratitude. In a letter thanking Lang for the report, he stated that he would "have it reproduced for all our Commission members," adding, "It obviously should inform our work and help in our deliberations."

Prepared by Congressional staff, but never officially released, the report says that the renowned Robert C. Gallo, of the National Cancer Institute, misrepresented his role in the identification of the AIDS virus and US government officials let him get away with it [SGR, February 15].

In their letter accompanying the report, Feder and Stewart wrote to Ryan that the Gallo case reflects serious failings of scientific integrity. Commending the report, and suggesting that Ryan's Commission could profit from it, the Feder-Stewart letter stated that Gallo's "misconduct was unusually broad in scope, with repeated, substantial, public misrepresentations made by Dr. Gallo and his colleagues over a period of several years, in scientific journals, in sworn statements, and in other forums...." They urged Ryan and his colleagues to get on the case, as they also did in a letter to NIH Director Harold Varmus.

Like most everything else in the Gallo case and in the Feder-Stewart operations, nothing is simple in this latest outburst of acrimony. Feder and Stewart achieved notice in scientific and Congressional circles starting in the mid-1980s when they unilaterally dropped their laboratory work at NIH and devoted themselves to studies and investigations of scientific misconduct. So-called whistleblowers and others with grievances concerning scientific ethics flocked to them. For a time, they served as consultants to Congressman John Dingell in his celebrated forays concerning scientific misconduct.

The management and much of the staff of NIH disdainfully regarded Feder and Stewart as failed scientists seeking publicity. But many scientists with sound credentials praised their work as accurate, important and reflective of the science's establishment's refusal to take the misconduct issue seriously. Until 1993, NIH tolerated their operations. But when they fed a controversy over Lincoln scholarship into their computerized "plagiarism" detector, NIH had enough and reassigned them to routine administrative duties, with strict orders to stay off the misconduct beat on government time.

The report for which they were chastised was produced by comrades in arms on the staff of Rep. Dingell during his long reign of terror as Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and its Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.

In preparation for three years, the report seemingly reflects Dingell's interest in issues of scientific misconduct involving federal funds. But, recalling the sour press commentary that Dingell reaped from his prior lashings of the scientific establishment, several staffers in Dingell's inner circle advised against publication. The manuscript was completed, but the internal dispute at the Committee was unresolved when the November election returned Dingell to office but toppled him from his chairmanship.

Having no good regard for products associated with the venemously partisan Dingell, his newly installed Republican successors on the committee never even considered publishing the report. However, the Dingell ex-staffers who worked on the Gallo case took matters into their own hands by printing and distributing a small number of paper copies and putting the document on the Internet: World Wide Web: http://nyx10.cs.du.edu:8001/~wstewart/

Though the product of Congressional staff members, the report has an ambiguous status, since it was never officially issued by a Congressional committee. Feder and Stewart gingerly refer to it as a "draft" report, though that word does not appear on the report or an accompanying summary.

The status of the report has been further clouded by an ambiguous letter from Dingell to NIH Director Harold Varmus, to whom Feder and Stewart also sent a copy of the Gallo report. In an accompanying letter to Varmus, they urged him to root out evil in his biomedical domain -- a suggestion that reportedly did not sit well with the NIH chief.

In his letter to Varmus, former Chairman Dingell says of the Gallo report that time ran out on the approval process, and he therefore "cannot vouch for the authenticity or the accuracy of papers provided to you." He had not reviewed the manuscript, Dingell stated, nor had other members of the staff director of his Committee. He also noted that "an early draft on the matter had been rejected by the Subcommittee staff director several months ago" -- not unusual in publishing in Congress or elsewhere. "Drafts and relevant files on this inquiry were turned over to the incoming majority as a pending and uncompleted matter," Dingell reported. With the emphasis on the uncompleted review, the letter does not add up to a disavowal of the report, but it does come close.

Former members of Dingell's staff tell SGR that his letter conjures up a Congressional peer-review system that, in fact, does not exist. They say that the Gallo report, densely laden with scientific terms and concepts, was both unintelligible and uninteresting to the political types around Dingell. With little or no review, other reports from the Dingell empire had been printed and officially released essentially as written, the ex-staffers report.

In the case of the Gallo report, publication was delayed, and time ran out, the Dingell alumni insist, because Dingell drew a lot of bad press from his hearing-room exchanges on scientific misconduct with Bernadine Healy, when she was Director of NIH, and Nobelist David Baltimore. While Dingell and his aides were still undecided about what to do, the Republican takeover occurred.

In any case, Dingell's letter to Varmus was another irritant contributing to the Feder and Stewart reprimand. The letter from NIDDK Executive Officer Laurence pinned the reprimand on their use of NIDDK stationery in writing to the Ryan Commission, but it also stated another grievance, namely: "that your use of Institute letterhead incorrectly suggests that you acted in an official capacity -- with the knowledge, resources, and approval of the organization. The gravity of your action is reflected by the fact that Representative John Dingell saw fit to write to NIH Director Harold Varmus a letter indicating that the report you distributed was not an official congressional report."

Quoting Dingell's distancing remarks about the Gallo report, the reprimand letter states that by using NIDDK stationery, "you have wrongly implicated this Institute in your action, thereby placing this organization in extremely difficult position vis-a-vis the congressional subcommittee whose report you distributed." The Laurence letter continued: "I want to emphasize again that any work you do relative to issues of scientific misconduct is not within the NIDDK mission and must be done on your own time, with your own resources, and under your own private aegis."

Though warning against further offenses, he indicated that forgiveness lies ahead: "This Official Reprimand will be made part of your Official Personnel Folder (OPF) for a period of no more than two years" he advised Feder and Stewart, "at which time it will be removed and destroyed."

Following the arrival of Laurence's letter, Feder and Stewart wrote to Chairman Ryan, asking him to help scrub the reprimand, which they noted arose from their appearance before the Commission he heads. The actions against them "pose a challenge to the Commission," they stated, and they added: "if the Commission is unable or unwilling to protect its own witnesses when they furnish information to the Commission in response to a request, how will it protect future witnesses who furnish information...?"

Their letter was on stationery of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

DSG