“Gifted” researcher is punished for faking data “Dr. Darsee is clearly one of the most remarkable young men in American
medicine. It is not extravagant to say that he became a legendary figure during
his year as chief resident in medicine at Grady Memorial Hospital.” With that exuberant commendation, Cardiologist Paul Walter of Emory
University endorsed the selection of his former colleague John Darsee
for one of the biggest plums in academic medicine: an appointment to
the Harvard Medical School faculty. Darsee's career to that point had
been a nonstop flight from modest origins in Huntington, W. Va., to
professional glory at age 31 as a research fellow at Harvard. Arriving
in 1979, he performed brilliantly, producing five papers in 15 months,
all published in major journals. In 1981 Dr. Eugene Braunwald, an
eminent cardiologist at the university, began action to place Darsee on
the faculty. Yet by the time all the letters of recommendation were in, the offer had
been withdrawn and Darsee's spectacular career was unraveling. The
young man, who is still called “brilliant and creative” by former
colleagues, had been caught faking research data. Last week the National Institutes of Health released the results of a
yearlong investigation into Darsee's misconduct; it announced that he
would be barred from receiving federal grant funds and contracts for
ten years, the harshest penalty for fraud it has ever imposed. The NIH
report not only documented Darsee's abuses at Harvard, but also raised
serious doubts about the veracity of research he had carried out
earlier at Emory. The NIH also sharply criticized Darsee's supervisors at the
Harvard-affiliated Cardiac Research Laboratory at Brigham and Women's
Hospital for failing to report promptly their initial suspicions about
Darsee's work. The young researcher was assigned to a project funded by
the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and aimed at developing
animal models for assessing the effectiveness of drugs used to treat
heart attacks. Charged NIH Associate Director William Raub: “A large
and costly study of great importance for a major public health problem
was irrevocably compromised.” Harvard was asked last week to return the
$122,371 it had received to fund the study. Suspicions about Darsee's work first arose in May 1981, when he was
pursuing another project. Tipped off by two other researchers,
Laboratory Director Robert Kloner found that Darsee had been faking
dates on reports to make a few hours' work look like two weeks' worth
of data. Kloner informed Braunwald, who terminated Darsee's fellowship
and notified Medical School Dean Daniel Tosteson. But Braunwald
accepted Darsee's plea that this was his sole offense. Unwilling to
destroy the career of what he called “an apparently brilliant
researcher,” Braunwald did not inform NIH officials. Instead, he and
Kloner conducted their own audit of Darsee's work and supervised him
closely during the next few months. They uncovered no evidence of
further misconduct.
