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Sorry for expressing something somewhat angry and bitter on Father's Day, but this has been seething inside of me for a long time and always comes to a head today. 32 years ago the @NIH killed my father, and has never answered for what they did.
You can read a news report about it from the @washingtonpost here washingtonpost.com/archive/politi….
The short version of the story. My father was a scientist at the @NIH. His boss, Dan Nebert, hired someone and assigned him to work with my father. This person fabricated data, and he and Nebert wrote a paper using this fabricated data, with my father as an author.
After the paper was written, my father uncovered the fraud. My last real memory of him is of him telling me he had caught this person making up data, and him spending time obsessively scribbling on a yellow legal pad to design an experiment that would expose him.
And he did expose him. I don't know exactly what happened next, but my father reported the fraud, triggering an investigation which led to a formal hearing. But the scientist in question never showed up, putting my father on the spot.
The @NIH has said subsequently that he wasn't a target of the investigation, but he didn't feel that way, and the feeling that he was being made to pay for exposing someone else's fraud destroyed him, and several weeks later he killed himself.
I came home from college shellshocked, and had lots of his @NIH colleagues come up to me and tell me that a deep injustice had been done and they vowed to get to the bottom of what had happened. But I never heard anything.
I was 19 when this happened - too young to realize there were things I could have done to find out what really happened. And maybe it was good that I wasn't plagues with bitterness at the time - as it was it took me a decade to recover in any meaningful way from what happened.
And now it's probably too late to learn what really happened in the investigation, and whether the @NIH looked into it at all, or learned anything from the affair. (I filed some FOAI requests five years ago, but they go nowhere). Maybe @NIHDirector can find out things I could not
As far as I can tell, the @NIH let itself off the hook, chalking it up to my father's mental state, not anything they did wrong. And my father's boss, Dan Nebert, who hired the scientists and then hung my father out to dry left the NIH and and a successful career elsewhere.
I'd like to say that time has healed the wounds, but it hasn't. If anything I've gotten angrier and angrier over the years. Angry that I never get to wish him a Happy Father's Day. Angry that my kids never got to meet him.
And I'm angry that the @NIH, who has so much power over so many lives, never seems to have wanted to learn anything from this. I don't even get that meager silver lining.
