Revisionist History - Strong Verbs, Short Sentences

Episode Date: July 12, 2018

“She was Joan of Arc, Madame Curie, and Florence Nightingale—all wrapped up in one.” Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The following podcast contains explicit language. August 1st, 1991, Washington, D.C. One of those sweltering D.C. summer days. Room 2322 of the Rayburn House Office Building, the big, grand congressional building right across from the Capitol. It's packed. Press, lawyers, aides. A long row of congressmen up on the dais.

And in the chairman's seat is John Dingell. Democrat of Michigan. A big man. Well past six feet. Gruff. Intimidating. Giant bald head. Thick black glasses. A bouncer in a business suit. In his heyday, Dingell was perhaps the most powerful man in Congress. And on this August afternoon, he's called in a who's who of the American scientific establishment for a reckoning. The hearing was not recorded.

All we have is the transcript. Dingell begins, It is the practice of this subcommittee, since it was first constituted by Sam Rayburn in 1958, that all witnesses testify under oath. Do any of you have any objection to testifying under oath this morning? They raised their right hands, a chorus of no's, a masterpiece of choreographed congressional

theater, until, in hour five, it all goes off the rails. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is the second of two parts about the bizarre outbreak of insanity that swept the United States a quarter century ago. A time when otherwise thoughtful and intelligent people took temporary leave of their senses and convinced themselves, against all evidence to the contrary, that American science was riddled with fraud. If you haven't listened to the first part, you should, before continuing on.

Part one is about how the panic started. This episode is about how it ended. When the immovable object named John Dingle ran into an unstoppable force named Bernadine Healy. I remember it well. I was there. My parents, and particularly my father, thought it was wonderful for a woman to be a doctor. The story of how the panic over science fraud ended revolves around three people. Congressman John Dingell, a brilliant scientist named Ramesh Sharma, and Bernadine Healy. Bernadine Healy was the first woman to run the National Institutes of Health, the most important biomedical research institution in the world, with billions of dollars at its disposal.

This is Healy in an interview a few years after she left the NIH, when she was head of the American Red Cross. When I was growing up, it was really exceptional, unusual for a woman to pursue a career in medicine. And as far as my father was concerned, it was the perfect place for me to go. It was a place where I could use my intelligence and my hard work, but also make a difference. Healy grew up in a little apartment in Queens, upstairs from her family's perfume business. Her parents were of Irish descent. She graduated number one in her class at Hunter College High School, then Vassar, Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins. When I went to Harvard Medical School, there were roughly 10 percent, less than 10 percent of the class were women. And in those days, although they probably don't like to remember this,

medical schools had quotas, and there was the prevailing attitude that women were taking up a spot that wasn't necessarily going to be used as well as a spot filled by a man. Women had to have, I think, better academic credentials and often go through much tougher screening. When Healy was young, she wanted to be a nun. But her father said no, because that would mean she'd have to be bossed around by a priest. And it must have been obvious, even then,

that Bernadine Healy was not cut out to be bossed around by anyone. She liked to quote St. Augustine. She cut her own hair. She wore a scot of suits. She was brilliant, and I've worked for a lot of really wonderful and accomplished people. This is Joanna Schneider, who was Healy's right hand during her years at the NIH. She could take a problem and sift through it quickly and come up with a couple of solutions very, very, very uprightly. And it was a beautiful thing to watch. Her writing was beautiful, but the way she spoke was beautiful as well. It was just a natural talent. It was a God-given talent. And so she was a bit of a force of nature when you met her. And I think most people felt the

same way. Tell me more. So describe for listeners who have never, may never have seen a picture of her. Let's see. Bernadine was tall, statuesque, blonde. She was beautiful, but didn't know it. Didn't understand the impact, I think, that she had on people physically. I talked to someone else who worked with Healy back then, a senior NIH official, who knew five separate NIH directors, countless Nobel laureates, and he said she was the most brilliant person he'd ever met. They only worked together for three years, 25 years ago. And what struck me is that he used the present tense in describing her, even though Healy has been dead for years. He said, her influence on me is everlasting.

Her first instinct was always fairness and justice. And I just, she was my father. My father was all about fairness and justice. She is a mix of Joan of Arc, Madame Curie, and Florence Nightingale. You know, she's all wrapped in a scada. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I met Healy years ago. I once followed her around for a few days and wrote a profile of her for the Washington Post. And I have to say that none of this is hyperbole. She spoke in casual conversation, the way the rest of us could only speak if we had

a week to prepare. She had a wooden sign on her desk that said strong verbs, short sentences. And that was Bernie. Back when Healy was on the faculty of Johns Hopkins Medical School, there was an all-male eating club called the Pitotomy Club. They had an annual comedy show and one year the main skit consisted of a man dressed in a long blonde wig, fishnet stockings and coconut half brassiere performing pornographic acts on other physicians at the hospital. It was supposed to be Healy.

Healy heard about it and complained. One person on staff, another woman, came to her defense. One person. People told her she had no sense of humor, that she should drop it. Bernadine, knock it off. Boys will be boys. But she wouldn't. She kept bringing it up at staff meetings. They told her she's hurting her career, and in fact, it does. She doesn't last long at Hopkins. But this is Bernadine Patricia Healy, disciple of fairness and justice.

She forces a face-to-face with the officers of the club. Healy didn't volunteer that story to me. I found out about it when I was doing research for my profile. At first, she didn't want to talk about it. Finally, she told me this, quote, I made every one of them answer how they would have felt if the skit was about their sister, their mother, or their wife. I went around the table and questioned their integrity,

their sensitivity, their wife. I went around the table and questioned their integrity, their sensitivity, their character. We're talking about an incident from 1982, mind you. Healy was a single mom, newly divorced, a young academic trying to make a name for herself in a world that at the time was probably 95% male. But oh wow, Bernie in full Bernie mode, strong verbs and short sentences. I would not have wanted to be one of those men around the table. When you said that she came to Washington and there were things she wanted to accomplish, what was on her mind when she first started at NIH? What is it she wanted to do? And she just said, women have been locked out of clinical trials. They've, you know, they've constantly, the scientific community has always just extrapolated

all these trials on men to women. And it just, it isn't necessarily good medicine. So we need to get women into trials. We need to open up an office for minorities. And she just said, this is what we're going to do at the NIH. And we're going to open science up. We're going to change it. We're going to double our budget. Wow. Okay.

What was the reception within NIH to her? Cold. Cold? Cold. Why? Chilly. They thought she was just being too aggressive, too pushy. And you could feel it in the meetings. You could feel it in the halls. How did she react to that chilly reception? I don't know why, but it never bothered her. Ever. Never. She said, I wasn't brought here to make friends or to get a group of people to like me. I came here to make changes. And, you know, God willing, in the Creek Don't rise, we're going to do that. And it never, she didn't need affirmation.

And that was, I was always fascinated by that. At the risk of stating the obvious, you really don't want to pick a fight with Bernadine Healy. I was born in 1935, December. At that time, British years ruled. Ramesh Sharma, the second character in this story. Sharma came to America

in 1960. He got his PhD, became a full professor, and made a revolutionary discovery of an entirely new cell signaling pathway, which is best described by the following analogy. If you want to drive from New York City to Miami,

you take the I-95 interstate. That's the main transportation corridor of the American Eastern Seaboard. Now imagine somebody says, wait, I've just discovered another interstate, just as wide and long, that also runs straight down the East Coast. Ramesh Sharma found the body's second interstate. In the late 1980s, Sharma is in demand,

and he gets a fantastic offer to set up his own laboratory at the Cleveland Clinic, one of the world's great research institutions. And who's running the Cleveland Clinic at that time? A young dynamo named Bernadine Healy, before she moves to the NIH. He comes, starts work, and one day in the spring of 1990, he comes back from lunch and gets a message. He's wanted in Healy's office. One of Sharma's colleagues has accused him of fraud. There's an investigation.

Sharma is cleared. There's a second investigation, then a third. The whole business ends up at the Office of Scientific Integrity, the NIH's anti-fraud unit, which is in the middle of its full-fledged hysteria mode. And the result unfolds just as it did in the cases that I spoke about in the middle of its full-fledged hysteria mode. And the result unfolds just as it did in the cases that I spoke about in the last episode. There are leaks to the media, sensational allegations, and in all of it, the same puzzling feature as the other cases. Almost no mention of what the accused is supposed to have done. So let me tell you what Sharma was accused of.

Sharma writes a grant application to the NIH, many thousands of words, a small portion of which concerns two proteins, alpha-2a and alpha-2gc. And on page 21 of the grant application, he has a line where he says he did such and such work with Alpha 2GC. And it isn't true. He hasn't done that particular work with Alpha 2GC. So the OSI says that's fraud. But Sharma says, no, it isn't. When I was typing, and I didn't know much typing, so I would consult with my wife. She said, how I can do and so forth, he said, Mish, let me help you. So she helped me. This is the late 1980s.

Word processes are primitive, and to type the name of a protein, as Sharma had to do, required the use of Greek letters and subscripts. It was a pretty tedious, complicated process, a process he had to do at least 130 times. of Greek letters and subscripts. It was a pretty tedious, complicated process, a process he had to do at least 130 times. So Sharma's wife programmed shortcut keystrokes for each of those two proteins. Sharma showed me how it worked on an actual keyboard. Well, they were side-by-side.

She put side-by-side, yeah. She developed the macros, there were two keys side-by-side. And he says, when I needed alpha 2A, press this. When I needed alpha 2GC, I press this. And that is how I kept on doing. But on page 21 of the grant application, Sharma's wife made a mistake, a typo. She hit the alpha 2GC key when she meant to hit the alpha 2A key, because they're right next to each other, which is how typos happen. How could they conclude that a single typographical error

constituted misconduct? You tell me that. That is what I have been asking them all over, and I asked the same thing to appeals board. Can you imagine in a document of 39 pages and two grants for 78 pages, they only find single typographical error? 78 pages, one typo. And the OSI gets so worked up that at one point they fly in a team of its investigators to interrogate Sharma, booked a room near the airport. At the airport, they asked me terrible questions. And in Tel Ebel, when they asked me some terrible questions,

I think they started to really bully me. As they were bullying him, Sharma happened to look at the cover page of the document they had given him to sign. The date was wrong. Off by a year. In the summary of charges against him, over a typo, they had made a typo.

Just remembering the absurdity of it all makes him jab the table in anger. I said, you yourself have done a mistake. My attorney even didn't know. I saw it. You yourself have done a mistake here. You have put wrong year, one year wrong. You can do a mistake and you are trying to take me to the Coles

with one typographical subscript error? They didn't answer me. And then they left. Sharma's contract at the Cleveland Clinic was not renewed. Doors that were once open to him were closed. I was stained. And I never recovered. My wife,

all what you did to him from India, originally in 1960s, all gone down the drain. Those are the consequences. And here we are talking about it today. I still get emotional about it. The man who discovered the body's second cellular pathway now works at a small university outside of Philadelphia. In the middle of all of this furor over Sharma's typo, Bernadine Healy was tapped to lead the NIH.

And when she leaves the Cleveland Clinic and arrives in Washington, she realizes that what happened to Sharma is happening to a lot of other scientists as well, that the anti-fraud unit at the NIH is in the grip of a hysteria. I'm proud of the little things I've been able to do while I've been here. And I'm prouder even still more of the people that I've been able to serve and help. John Dingell, the third character in this story. Dingell is Washington royalty. His father, John Dingell Sr., was elected to Congress in 1933. As a kid, Dingell was a congressional page.

When his dad died in 1955, Dingell ran for the family seat and won. He served until 2015, almost 60 years. And when he retired, his wife Debbie ran for his seat and won, meaning that we are now in the ninth decade of Dingell's occupying that chair in the House. During the long years when the Democrats controlled Congress, Dingell was as powerful as anyone in Washington. And his self-assumed role was congressional watchdog, scourge of fraud and abuse. When I was chairman of the Commerce Committee, I was also chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Committee, the Commerce Committee, I was also chairman of the Oversight Investigations Committee, and I was, I think, one of the better investigators

they've ever had here. This is Dingell in an interview with the Edward M. Kennedy Institute a few years ago. We figured it was a bad year when we didn't make defense contractors give back a million, a billion to $2 billion. And it was a bad year when we didn't, frankly, send a fair number of folks to jail or force major changes, either in policy or personnel or both, in the federal government. I kept a picture of Joe McCarthy on the wall to remind me what I did not want to be

and what a bad investigator was. Dingell's oversight committee had its own squad of investigators, and they were famous. Big, aggressive guys, very much in the image of their boss. What they loved to do was pester the agencies on their watch, the NIH, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control. They would send what were called dinglegrams, letters demanding action, expressing outrage, requesting boxes and boxes of documents. I once asked the director of the FDA to count the number of letters Dingle's staff had sent him. In a year and a half, 175. 175. Romeo and Juliet did not send each other 175 letters. And each of those 175 letters required immediate attention. They would accuse the FDA of not being

tough enough on the pharmaceutical industry. Then, when the FDA got tough, Dingell would write them letters accusing them of being too tough on the industry. He was sort of the scourge of the NIH, and his staff used to write us letters all the time saying, what about this? I want to see that. John Dingell and his staff did not pursue a coherent ideological agenda. They were just bullies. Joanna Schneider remembers Dingell looming over Healy's time at NIH. What got under her skin was we spent so much time, energy, resources, and man hours answering those

queries when she felt like this is wrong. We should be trying to change the world. We should be looking at clinical trials. We should be looking at minority health. So I think what happened with John Dingell was she just felt like this is politics. This isn't science. This is, I'm not going to do this anymore. The Office of Scientific Integrity at the NIH, the group responsible for science fraud investigations, answered to Dingell. Sometimes people at the OSI would simply transfer to Dingell and set up shop in his oversight office. The leaks that arrived on my desk at the Washington Post came, as often as not, from Dingell's office. I said in the last episode that I think of the science fraud panic

as a consequence of our fear of AIDS. But panic needs fuel. Dingell was the fuel. People were afraid, John Dingell, and I think that made an enormous difference. That's Joe Onik. He was one of Ramesh Sharma's lawyers, a leader in the small group who spent the early 90s trying to fend off the science fraud hysteria. How did the OSI investigators have the freedom to run amok, to spend years investigating typos? And I never understood how they got away with that for so long. John Dingell. You think it's just all John Dingell? Yes, I think that they had protection. And they knew they had protection, or I don't know how much they were aware of it in their most conscious, but they understood they had protection.

And I think they felt that they could get away with it. So Bernadine Healy thinks that the science fraud investigations are out of control, and she moves in to restore some kind of sanity. Dingell hears about her plan. He isn't happy. Thus, the hearing of August 1st, 1991. Dingell invites two people from the OSI, his people, to give his side of the story, and then he lines up everyone in Healy's chain of command, her boss, her deputy, her legal counsel, and of course her. Over the course of the day, Dingell will slowly build the case against her. She will testify last when the trap is good and

ready. And what's the trap? Rame Sharma. Healy was at the Cleveland Clinic when the clinic allowed Sharma's outrageous fraud to be perpetrated. What does that say about her leadership and character in the face of one of the gravest crises to hit American science since he wants to humiliate her? Dingell wants to pick a fight with Bernadine Healy. Two weeks before the hearing, on July 19, 1991, two of Dingell's staffers went up to the NIH campus in Bethesda, just outside of Washington, to meet Bernadine Healy. They were laying the trap for the big day. I will say that I tried very, very hard to get someone from the Dingell camp

to give their side of what happened that day. Dingell is now retired. I contacted his former press person, who promised to help, but then vanished. I tried repeatedly to reach Dingell through his wife's press person, who now handles his press inquiries. She promised to help until I told her what I was interested in talking about. Then she vanished. Dingell's former chief of staff declined to talk. He emailed me. That was about 25 years ago, and my recollections at this point are limited at best. Which is funny, because I have yet to encounter memory problems from anyone who was on the

receiving end of the Dingle staff in those years. So what I'm relying on is a meticulously sourced account from Daniel Kevlus, now a distinguished historian at Yale, who in 1998 published An Exhaustive History of This Era. Kevless tracked down as many people as he could who participated in the meeting between Healy and Dingell's staff. I'm reading now. They asked her about the house she was living in on the NIH campus. Did she pay rent? Did she have expensive commodes? Commodes? I'm quoting again from Kevlus. Healy adds that they demeaned the NIH leaders. We were lapdogs, not scientific watchdogs, they said.

Then they, quote, gloated, unquote, about having taken down some of the biggest names in science. And when Healy pointed out that those scientists hadn't been granted anything like due process, they said they didn't care because they knew they were guilty. Healy says they, meaning the Dingle staffers, behaved like, quote, thugs, absolute thugs. She later told a reporter that they laced their talk with four-letter words, yelling, screaming, insults. Then comes this. One of Dingell's men turns to Healy's deputy, who is in the meeting, and insinuates that Healy, quote,

had a personal relationship, unquote, with David Baltimore, the Nobel Prize winning scientist who'd been wrapped up in one of the longest and most absurd of the OSI's fraud investigations. I think we can be certain that the phrase personal relationship is a sanitized version of what was actually said. One of Dingell's henchmen goes to the office of one of the most senior science officials in the land, a woman of principle and dignity and accomplishment, a woman who quotes St. Augustine, for goodness sake, and in front of her, in her presence, turns to her male deputy and says, I know why she's standing up for Baltimore.

She's fucking him. Do you know what Healy says when she tells Kevlus that story? Just, how slimy is that one? Short sentences, strong verbs. Two weeks after all this, Bernadine Healy makes the trek down to Capitol Hill for her scheduled humiliation. She waits her turn. She raises her right hand and calmly answers question after question about Ramesh Sharma's typo and the Cleveland Clinic. I would direct you to the exchange beginning on page 223 of the transcript, where one of Dingell's fellow committee members, Norman Lent, Republican of Long Island, starts to

question Healy about the signature page of Ramesh Sharma's grant application. As I said at the beginning, this hearing was not recorded, but it deserves theatrical reenactment. Congressman Landon. Dr. Healy, there was something about these grant applications that intrigues me, particularly grant application NS-2374401, which is the one dated February 24th, 1989. He's talking about Ramesh Sharma's grant. You evidently signed and dated the grant application on February 22nd, 1989, while the principal investigator evidently did not sign and date the grant application until February 24th, 1989. Lentz's point is that when a scientist signs a grant application,

he or she is testifying that it's true. So if Healy signed first, then she was signing on to something before it had been certified as true. I guess. Lent goes on. And on. And the room is starting to get restless,

because the promise of a Dingell hearing is a powerful climax when the hammer comes down on some hapless victim. But after a long day, all we've got is Congressman Lent yammering on about a signature page to someone who probably signed hundreds of signature pages a year. Big John Dingell, up on the dais, looks over at Lent. Would the gentleman yield? And then he lunges for Healy.

Why is it that the application was done up? Everything was there except the signature of the investigator. And you signed it? My problem here is that I see the institution signs first and then the investigator signs. I would assume that it first and then the investigator signs. I would assume that it would be the investigator that signs and then you say everything he says is true and I am relying on the content and my own knowledge and I am also relying on his signature. At this point all of us in the audience realized something. This was all Dingell had. He had no

case. This is congressional theater, and the best he can offer is a Jesuitical discussion of grant application signing procedures. Here, you didn't even have the signature. If he had signed first and then I had signed, you could argue, how could he have signed before I gave my assurances that we were going to give him the space? Somebody had to sign first. Because the hearing has been going on for five hours,

and she cannot believe that she, Bernadine Healy, is in charge of the world's most important medical research institution, and she's being forced to sit and be interrogated on the sequence of signatures on a grant application that just happened to include a completely meaningless typo on page 21. Interrogated by the same man whose lackeys came to her office and in front of her made the most vile of insinuations. The question though is, why was it you had to sign first? I didn't have to sign first. This is the way it was brought to me. He signed second and you signed first. Who's on third? And in that moment, as the room erupts in laughter

and Chairman Dingle's giant bald head turns the color of a radish, the spell is broken. Every time I think of that moment, I go back to my childhood memories of Danny Kaye playing the little boy in the king's new clothes. The king is in the altogether, the altogether. Healy goes back to her office and she says, that's it. From now on, if you've been accused of scientific fraud by the NIH, you have the right to an appeal.

Meaning, no more conclusions leaked to the press before the accused has a chance to respond. You can take your case to a panel of judges. And lo and behold, once the accused had a chance to defend themselves, the cases against them fell apart. The appeals board said in the Ramesh Sharma case, it's a typo. Healy called him up. Ramesh, truth always wins. You are honest, and you won. The NIH stops persecuting its grantees. The case against David Baltimore gets thrown out. The OSI drops its case against the Georgetown scientist Margeet Hamish. Mika Popovic,

the AIDS researcher who was hounded out of his job over the meaning of the abbreviation ND, was vindicated. The verdict against him was thrown out by Healy's appeals board with this choice line. One might anticipate that from all this evidence, after all the sound and fury, there would be at least a residue of palpable wrongdoing. That is not the case. I went to her and said, we need a private meeting with John Dingell. I'm going to set it up. Will you go? She said yes. Called a friend, called a friend, got a private meeting with John Dingell, and she and I went.

Healy's right hand, Joanna Schneider, sought a truce. Dingell was the most powerful man in Congress, and Healy wanted to double the budget of the NIH. She needed him. But you can imagine how it went. The unstoppable force and the immovable object. She made it clear that his people were pushing too hard on things that didn't matter. And, you know, he kind of dismissed, he didn't dismiss her, but, you know, he didn't engage on the topic.

And so she went back to it. Oh, she kept on saying it. Yes. And, you know, I'm sitting there, my heart's beating. I just, you know, I thought the world of her, and I thought she could charm him again. But she wasn't, that wasn't her agenda. So you're sitting there, and you're really, really worried

she's going to stick the needle in your head? She didn't have the same agenda I had. And she was going to let him know, you know, that he was making a mistake. And I guess Bernadine was the one who was going to say, no more. This stops here. Before the meeting ended, Joanna Schneider took a picture of the two of them, Dingle and Healy. Schneider showed it to me. Healy has a big smile. Dingle looks like a stuck pig.

Healy could have let it pass, mended fences, a little bowing and scraping before the king. But she didn't. Because the only way that hysterias end is when someone has the courage to say enough. Why do I love Bernadine Healy? Because she showed us how it's done. The next day, she sends me a huge bouquet of flowers and she says, maybe Thelma and Louise lived happily ever after, after all.

Which was darling. Wait, what does she mean that you guys were Thelma and Louise and you drove off the cliff? See, and the reason I tell you that story is she you know she saw her she was on a mission and for the people who worked for her for the people around her you could really get caught up in it in in the best way in the right way. You were caught up in it, and you thought you could change the world with her. I always felt like the world was a safer place with Bernadine Healy in it. Revisionist History is a Panoply production. The senior producer is Mia Lobel. Thank you. and special thanks to our revisionist history players, Jody Markell, Ken Marks, and Long Island's finest, Mike Peska.

And thanks, as always, to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Let me repeat the question. What do you understand your liability would be if your certification was erroneous? My understanding is that if I told the truth at the time that I signed them, I would have no liability. Let me help you out. I think what you're trying to say is if you signed the paper and it contained false statements, and you didn't willfully make the false statement, there would be no liability.

I made no false statements, Mr. Lent. You made no false statements willfully, I think is what you want to say. Mr. Lent, when an institutional official signs a grant application, they sign as a partner with the investigator. The major responsibility of the institutional official is to say, yes, we are agreeing that this grant be submitted and we will provide the resources that are necessary to see that this grant is done. My point is, Dr. Healy. Indeed, if you are saying that any institutional official that signs a grant is certifying that they are 100% sure that everything in that grant is perfect, I don't think you will have any institutional official signing any of our 20,000 NIH grants that are currently funded. In view of the fact that you had certified as to the truthfulness of the statements in the

grant application in the first place. I did not certify to the truthfulness. I said to the best of my knowledge those grant applications are correct. I had no way of certifying to their truthfulness. I don't want to overdo this. I read it once. A willfully false certification is a criminal offense. I was trying to help you there before when I said what you are saying is that if it is not a willful misstatement, there would be no liability on your part. I wasn't even aware that there was a misstatement. I'm not sure I understand this case is still open, Mr. Lent. The jury is still out on this case. Thank you.