Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: The following podcast contains explicit language. August first, nineteen ninety one, Washington,
Speaker 2: d C. One of those sweltering DC summer days, Room
Speaker 2: twenty three to twenty two of the Rayburn House Office building,
Speaker 2: the big grand Congressional building right across from the Capitol.
Speaker 2: It's packed press, lawyers aids, a long row of congressman
Speaker 2: up on the dais, and in the chairman's seat is
Speaker 2: John Dingall, Democrat of Michigan, A big man, well pass
Speaker 2: six feet gruff, intimidating, giant bald head, thick black glasses,
Speaker 2: a bouncer in a business suit. In his heyday, Dingle
Speaker 2: was perhaps hups the most powerful man in Congress. And
Speaker 2: on this August afternoon he's called in a who's who
Speaker 2: of the American scientific establishment for a reckoning. The hearing
Speaker 2: was not recorded. All we have is a transcript. Dingle begins.
Speaker 2: It is the practice of this subcommittee, since it was
Speaker 2: first constituted by Sam Rayburn in nineteen fifty eight, that
Speaker 2: all witnesses testify under oath. Do any of you have
Speaker 2: any objection to testifying under oath? This morning they raised
Speaker 2: their right hands a chorus of No's A masterpiece of
Speaker 2: choreographed congressional theater until in our five it all goes
Speaker 2: off the rails. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening
Speaker 2: to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
Speaker 2: This episode is the second of two parts about the
Speaker 2: bizarre outbreak of insanity that swept the United States a
Speaker 2: quarter century ago, a time when otherwise thoughtful and intelligent
Speaker 2: people took temporary leave of their senses and convinced themselves,
Speaker 2: against all evidence to the contrary, that American science was
Speaker 2: riddled with fraud. And if you haven't listened to the
Speaker 2: first part, you should before continuing on. Part one is
Speaker 2: about how the panic started. This episode is about how
Speaker 2: it ended when the immovable object named John Dingle ran
Speaker 2: into an unstoppable force named Bernardine Healy. I remember it well.
Speaker 2: I was there.
Speaker 3: My parents, and particularly my father, thought it was wonderful
Speaker 3: for a woman to be a doctor.
Speaker 2: The story of how the panic over science fraud ended
Speaker 2: revolves around three people, Congressman John Dingle, a brilliant scientist
Speaker 2: named Remey Sharma, and Bernardin Heey. Bernardin Heely was the
Speaker 2: first woman to run the National Institutes of Health, the
Speaker 2: most important biomedical research institution in the world, with billions
Speaker 2: of dollars at its disposal. This is Healey in an
Speaker 2: interview a few years after she left the NIH when
Speaker 2: she was head of the American Red Cross.
Speaker 3: When I was growing up, it was really exceptional, unusual
Speaker 3: for a woman to pursue a career in medicine, and
Speaker 3: as far as my father was concerned, it was the
Speaker 3: perfect place for me to go. It was a place
Speaker 3: where I could use my intelligence and my hard work,
Speaker 3: but also make a difference.
Speaker 2: Heally grew up in a little apartment in Queen's upstairs
Speaker 2: from her family's perfume business. Her parents were of Irish descent.
Speaker 2: She graduated number one in her class at Hunter College
Speaker 2: High School, then Vassar, Harvard Medical School JOHNS. Hopkins.
Speaker 3: When I went to Harvard Medical School, roughly ten percent
Speaker 3: less than ten percent of the class were women. And
Speaker 3: in those days, although they probably don't like to remember this,
Speaker 3: medical schools head quotas, and there was the prevailing attitude
Speaker 3: that women were taking up a spot that wasn't necessarily
Speaker 3: going to be used as well as a spot filled
Speaker 3: by a man. Women had to have I think better
Speaker 3: academic credentials and often go through much tougher screening.
Speaker 2: When Heally was young, she wanted to be a nun,
Speaker 2: but her father said no, because that would mean she'd
Speaker 2: have to be bossed around by a priest. And it
Speaker 2: must have been obvious even then that Bernard and Healely
Speaker 2: was not cut out to be bossed around by anyone.
Speaker 2: She liked to quote Saint Augustine. She cut her own hair,
Speaker 2: she wore a scott of suits.
Speaker 4: She was brilliant and I've worked for a lot of
Speaker 4: really wonderful and accomplished people.
Speaker 2: This is Joanna Schneider, who was Healey's right hand during
Speaker 2: her years at the NAH.
Speaker 4: She could take a problem and sift through it quickly
Speaker 4: and come up with a couple of solutions, very very
Speaker 4: very brightly, and it was a beautiful thing to watch.
Speaker 4: Her writing was beautiful, but the way she spoke was
Speaker 4: beautiful as well. It was just a natural talent. It
Speaker 4: was a god given talent, and so she was a
Speaker 4: bit of a force of nature when you met her,
Speaker 4: and I think most people felt the same way.
Speaker 2: Tell me more so describe for listeners who have never
Speaker 2: may never have refer seen the picture of her.
Speaker 4: Let's see. Bernardine was tall, statuesque, blonde. She was beautiful,
Speaker 4: but didn't know it, didn't understand the impact I think
Speaker 4: that she had on people physically.
Speaker 2: I talked to someone else who worked with Heally back then,
Speaker 2: a senior NIH official who knew five separate NIH directors,
Speaker 2: countless Nobel laureates, and he said she was the most
Speaker 2: brilliant person he'd ever met. They only worked together for
Speaker 2: three years, twenty five years ago. And what struck me
Speaker 2: is that he used the present tense in describing her,
Speaker 2: even though Healey has been dead for years. He said,
Speaker 2: her influence on me is everlasting.
Speaker 4: Her first instinct was always fairness and justice, and I
Speaker 4: just she was my father.
Speaker 5: My father was.
Speaker 4: All about fairness and justice. She is a mix of
Speaker 4: Joan of Arc, Madame Curie, and Florence Nightingale. You know,
Speaker 4: she's all Repta in a scotta. Absolutely absolutely.
Speaker 2: I met Heally years ago. I once followed her around
Speaker 2: for a few days and wrote a profile of her
Speaker 2: for the Washington Post. And I have to say that
Speaker 2: none of this is hyperbole. She spoke in casual conversation
Speaker 2: the way the rest of us could only speak if
Speaker 2: we had a week to prepare.
Speaker 4: She had a wooden sign on her desk that said
Speaker 4: strong verbs, short sentences, and that was Bernie Back.
Speaker 2: When Healey was on the faculty of Johns Hopkins Medical School,
Speaker 2: there was an all male eating club called the Pittotomy Club.
Speaker 2: They had an annual comedy show, and one year the
Speaker 2: mainskit consisted of a man dressed in a long blonde wig,
Speaker 2: fishnet stockings, and coconut half brazier performing pornographic acts on
Speaker 2: other physicians at the hospital. It was supposed to be Healy.
Speaker 2: Heally heard about it and complained one person on staff.
Speaker 2: Another woman came to her defense. One person people told
Speaker 2: her she had no sense of humor, that she should
Speaker 2: drop it, Bernardine, knock it off. Boys will be boys.
Speaker 2: But she wouldn't. She kept bringing it up at staff meetings.
Speaker 2: They told her she's hurting her career, and in fact
Speaker 2: it does. She doesn't last long at Hopkins. But this
Speaker 2: is Bernardine Patricia Healey disciple of fairness and justice. She
Speaker 2: forces a face to face with the officers of the club.
Speaker 2: Heally didn't volunteer that story to me. I found out
Speaker 2: about it when I was doing research for my profile.
Speaker 2: At first, she didn't want to talk about it. Finally
Speaker 2: she told me this quote. I made every one of
Speaker 2: them answer how they would have felt if the skit
Speaker 2: was about their sister, their mother, or their wife. I
Speaker 2: went around the table and questioned their integrity, their sensitivity,
Speaker 2: their character. We're talking about an incident from nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 2: Mind you, Heally was a single mom, newly divorced, a
Speaker 2: young academic, trying to make a name for herself in
Speaker 2: a world that at the time was probably ninety five
Speaker 2: percent male. But oh wow, Bernie in full Bernie mode,
Speaker 2: strong verbs and short sentences. I would not have wanted
Speaker 2: to be one of those men around the table when
Speaker 2: you said that she came to Washington and there were
Speaker 2: things she wanted to accomplish. Yeah, what was she what
Speaker 2: was on her mind when she first started the Nah,
Speaker 2: what is it she wanted to do?
Speaker 4: And she just said, women have been locked out of
Speaker 4: clinical trials. They've you know, they've they've constantly the scientific
Speaker 4: community has always just extrapolated all these trials on men
Speaker 4: to women, and it just it isn't necessarily good medicine.
Speaker 4: So we need to get women into trials. We need
Speaker 4: to open up an office for minorities. And she just said,
Speaker 4: this is what we're going to do at the NIAH,
Speaker 4: and we're going to open science up, We're going to
Speaker 4: change it. We're going to double our budget. Wow, okay.
Speaker 2: What was the reception within? And I aged her cold? Cold, cold?
Speaker 4: Why chili? They thought she was just being too aggressive,
Speaker 4: to pushy, and you could feel it in the meetings,
Speaker 4: you could feel it in the halls.
Speaker 2: How does she react to that chili reception?
Speaker 4: I don't know why, but it never bothered her ever.
Speaker 4: Never she said, I wasn't brought here to make friends
Speaker 4: or to get a group of people to like me.
Speaker 4: I came here to make changes. And you know, God
Speaker 4: willing and the creek don't rise, We're going to do that.
Speaker 4: And it never. She didn't need affirmation. And that was
Speaker 4: I was always fascinated by that.
Speaker 2: At the risk of stating the obvious, you really don't
Speaker 2: want to pick a fight with Bernardine Healy.
Speaker 5: Does Vaughn and nineteen thirty five December. At that time
Speaker 5: British sales ruled REMAE.
Speaker 2: Sharma, the second character in this story. Sharma came to
Speaker 2: America in nineteen sixty. He got his PhD, became a
Speaker 2: full professor and made a revolutionary discovery of an entirely
Speaker 2: new cell signaling pathway, which is best described by the
Speaker 2: following analogy. If you want to drive from New York
Speaker 2: City to Miami, you take the I ninety five interstate.
Speaker 2: That's the main transportation corridor of the American Eastern Seaboard.
Speaker 2: Now imagine somebody says, wait, I've just discovered another interstate
Speaker 2: just as wide and long that also runs straight down
Speaker 2: the East coast. Remay Sharma found the body's second interstate.
Speaker 2: In the late nineteen eighties, Sharma is in demand and
Speaker 2: he gets a fantastic offer to set up his own
Speaker 2: laboratory at the Cleveland Clinic, one of the world's great
Speaker 2: research institutions. And who's running the Cleveland Clinic at that time,
Speaker 2: a young dynamo named Bernardine Healey. Before she moves to
Speaker 2: the nih, he comes, starts work, and one day in
Speaker 2: the spring of nineteen ninety he comes back from lunch
Speaker 2: and gets a message He's wanted in Healey's office. One
Speaker 2: of Sharma's colleagues has accused him of fraud. There's an investigation,
Speaker 2: Sharma is cleared, there's a second investigation, then a third,
Speaker 2: the whole business ends up at the Office of Scientific Integrity,
Speaker 2: the NIH's anti fraud unit, which is in the middle
Speaker 2: of its full fledged hysteria mode, and the result unfolds
Speaker 2: just as it did in the cases that I spoke
Speaker 2: about in the last episode. There are leaks to the media,
Speaker 2: sensational allegations, and in all of it the same puzzling
Speaker 2: feature as the other cases, almost no mention of what
Speaker 2: the accused is supposed to have done. So let me
Speaker 2: tell you what Sharma was accused of. Sharma writes a
Speaker 2: grant application to the NAH many thousands of words, a
Speaker 2: small portion of which concerns two proteins, Alpha two A
Speaker 2: and Alpha two GC. And on page twenty one of
Speaker 2: the grant application, he has a line where he says,
Speaker 2: he did such and such work with alpha two GC,
Speaker 2: and it isn't true. He hasn't done that particular work
Speaker 2: with alpha two GC. So the OSI says that's fraud,
Speaker 2: but Sharma says, no, it isn't.
Speaker 5: When I was diving and I do not much diving,
Speaker 5: so I would consult with my wife. She how how
Speaker 5: I can do and so forth these emissions. Let me
Speaker 5: help you, So she helped.
Speaker 2: Me This is the late nineteen eighties. Word processes are primitive,
Speaker 2: and to type the name of a protein, as Sharma
Speaker 2: had to do, required the use of Greek letters and subscripts.
Speaker 2: It was a pretty tedious, complicated process, a process he
Speaker 2: had to do at least one hundred and thirty times.
Speaker 2: So Sharma's wife programmed shortcut keystrokes for each of those
Speaker 2: two proteins. Shama showed me how it worked on an
Speaker 2: actual keyboard. Or they were side by side.
Speaker 5: Side and she put side by side. Yeah, she could
Speaker 5: twelve the macross the two keys side by side. And
Speaker 5: he says, when I needed alpha two A, press this,
Speaker 5: and I needed al for two GC appress this, and
Speaker 5: that is how I kept on doing.
Speaker 2: But on page twenty one of the Grand Application, Sharma's
Speaker 2: wife made a mistake a typo. She hit the alpha
Speaker 2: two GC key when she meant to hit the alpha
Speaker 2: two A key because they're right next to each other,
Speaker 2: which is how typos happen. How could they conclude that
Speaker 2: a single typographical error constituted misconduct?
Speaker 5: You tell me that that is what I have been
Speaker 5: asking them all over and the iost the same thing
Speaker 5: two appeals more. Can you magine in a document of
Speaker 5: thirty nine are paging two grants for seventy eight pages,
Speaker 5: the only fine single typographical.
Speaker 2: Raaler seventy eight pages one typo, and the OSI gets
Speaker 2: so worked up that at one point they fly in
Speaker 2: a team of its investigators to interrogate Sharma booked a
Speaker 2: room near the airport.
Speaker 5: At at the airport, they asked me terrible questions, and
Speaker 5: in talibrable. When they asked me some terrible questions, I
Speaker 5: think they started to really bully me.
Speaker 2: As they were bullying him, Sharma happened to look at
Speaker 2: the cover page of the document they had given him
Speaker 2: to sign. The date was wrong off by a year
Speaker 2: in the summary of charges against him over a typo.
Speaker 2: They had made a typo. Just remembering the absurdity of
Speaker 2: it all makes him jab the table and anger.
Speaker 5: I said, you yourself are dnamost turney even didn't know
Speaker 5: I saw it. Are you yourself done a mistake here?
Speaker 5: Now you have put wrong year, one year wrong. You
Speaker 5: can do a mistake, and you are trying to take
Speaker 5: me to the goals with one typographical subscript. There didn't
Speaker 5: answer me and then they left.
Speaker 2: Sharma's contract at the Cleveland Clinic was not renewed. Doors
Speaker 2: that were once opened to him were closed.
Speaker 5: I was stained and I never recovered. My wife Satra
Speaker 5: mesh All. What you did recame from India and originally
Speaker 5: in nineteen sixty is all gone down with Those are
Speaker 5: the consequences, and here we are talking about him today.
Speaker 5: I still get emotional about it.
Speaker 2: The man who discovered the body's second cellular pathway now
Speaker 2: works at a small university outside of Philadelphia. In the
Speaker 2: middle of all of this fear over Sharma's typo, Bernardine
Speaker 2: Healy was tapped to lead the NIH, and when she
Speaker 2: leaves the Cleveland clinic and arrives in Washington, she realizes
Speaker 2: that what happened to Sharma is happening to a lot
Speaker 2: of other scientists as well, that the anti fraud unit
Speaker 2: at the NIH is in the grip of a hysteria.
Speaker 1: I'm proud of the little things I've been able to
Speaker 1: do while I've been here, and I'm to eat proud
Speaker 1: or even still more of the people that I've been
Speaker 1: able to serve and help.
Speaker 2: John Dingle, the third character in this story. Dingle is
Speaker 2: Washington Royalty. His father, John Dingall Senior, was elected to
Speaker 2: Congress in nineteen thirty three. As a kid, Dingall was
Speaker 2: a Congressional page. When his dad died in nineteen fifty five,
Speaker 2: Dingle ran for the family seat and won. He served
Speaker 2: until twenty fifteen, almost sixty years, and when he retired,
Speaker 2: his wife, Debbie, ran for his seat and won, meaning
Speaker 2: that we are now in the ninth decade of Dingle's
Speaker 2: occupying that chair in the House. During the long years
Speaker 2: when the Democrats controlled Congress, Dingall was as powerful as
Speaker 2: anyone in Washington, and his self assumed role was congressional watchdog,
Speaker 2: scourge of fraud and abuse.
Speaker 6: When I was chairman of the Commresce Committee, I was
Speaker 6: also a chairman of the Oversight Investigations Committee, and I was,
Speaker 6: I think one of the better investigators they've ever had here.
Speaker 2: This is Dingall in an interview with the Edward M.
Speaker 2: Kennedy Institute a few years ago.
Speaker 6: Sure was a bad year when we didn't make defense
Speaker 6: contractors give back a million a billion to two billion.
Speaker 6: And it was a bad year when we didn't frankly,
Speaker 6: send a fair number of folks to jail or force
Speaker 6: major changes either in policy or personnel or both in
Speaker 6: the federal government. I kept a picture of Joe McCarthy
Speaker 6: on the wall to remind me what I did not
Speaker 6: want to be and what a bad investigator was.
Speaker 2: Dingle's oversight committee had its own squad of investigators, and
Speaker 2: they were famous, big aggressive guys, very much in the
Speaker 2: image of their boss. What they loved to do was
Speaker 2: pester the agencies on their watch, the NIH, the Food
Speaker 2: and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control. They would
Speaker 2: send what were called Dingle grams, letters demanding action, expressing outrage,
Speaker 2: requesting boxes and boxes of documents. I once asked the
Speaker 2: director of the FDA to count the number of letters
Speaker 2: dingle staff had sent him in a year and a half,
Speaker 2: one hundred and seventy five. One hundred and seventy five.
Speaker 2: Romeo and Juliet did not send each other one hundred
Speaker 2: and seventy five letters, and each of those one hundred
Speaker 2: and seventy five letters required immediate attention. They would accuse
Speaker 2: the FDA of not being tough enough on the pharmaceutical industry.
Speaker 2: Then when the FDA got tough, Dingle would write them
Speaker 2: letters accusing him of being too tough on the industry.
Speaker 4: He was sort of the scourge of the NIH and
Speaker 4: his staff used to write us letters all the time
Speaker 4: saying what about this.
Speaker 2: I want to see that John Dingell and his staff
Speaker 2: did not pursue a coherent ideological agenda. They were just bullies.
Speaker 2: Johanna Schneider remembers Dingle looming over Healey's time at NIH.
Speaker 4: What got under her skin was we spent so much time, energy, resources,
Speaker 4: and man hours answering those queries when she felt like,
Speaker 4: this is wrong. We should be trying to change the world.
Speaker 4: We should be looking at clinical trials, we should be
Speaker 4: looking at minority health. So I think what happened with
Speaker 4: John Dingall was she just felt like, this is politics,
Speaker 4: This isn't science, this is I'm not going to do
Speaker 4: this anymore.
Speaker 2: The Office of Scientific Integrity at the NIH, the group
Speaker 2: responsible for science fraud investigations, answered to Dingle. Sometimes people
Speaker 2: at the OSI would simply transfer to Dingle and set
Speaker 2: up shop in his oversight office. The leaks that arrived
Speaker 2: on my desk at the Washington Post came as often
Speaker 2: as not from Dingle's office. I said in the last
Speaker 2: episode that I think of the science fraud panic as
Speaker 2: a consequence of our fear of AIDS, but panic needs fuel.
Speaker 2: Dingle was the fuel.
Speaker 7: People were afraid, John Denk, and I think that made
Speaker 7: an enormous difference.
Speaker 2: That's Joe Onic. He was one of Rames Sharma's lawyers,
Speaker 2: a leader in the small group who spent the early
Speaker 2: nineties trying to fend off the science fraud hysteria. How
Speaker 2: did the OSI investigators have the freedom to run amok,
Speaker 2: to spend years investigating typos? And I never said how
Speaker 2: they got away with that for so long, John Dingall,
Speaker 2: you think it's just all John Dix.
Speaker 7: I think that they had protection, and they could they
Speaker 7: knew they had protection, or I don't know how much
Speaker 7: they work aware of it in them most kinds of that.
Speaker 7: They understood they had protection, and I think they felt
Speaker 7: that they could get away with it.
Speaker 2: So Bernardine Healy thinks that the science fraud investigations are
Speaker 2: out of control, and she moves in to restore some
Speaker 2: kind of sanity. Dingle hears about her plan. He isn't happy. Thus,
Speaker 2: the hearing of August first, nineteen ninety one, Dingle invites
Speaker 2: two people from the OSI to give his side of
Speaker 2: the story, and then he lines up everyone in Healey's
Speaker 2: chain of command, her boss, her deputy, her legal counsel,
Speaker 2: and of course her. Over the course of the day,
Speaker 2: Dingle will slowly build the case against her. She will
Speaker 2: testify last when the trap is good and ready. And
Speaker 2: what's the trap? Ramee Sharma? Heally was at the Cleveland
Speaker 2: clinic when the clinic allowed Sharma's outrageous fraud to be perpetrated.
Speaker 2: What does that say about her leadership and character in
Speaker 2: the face of one of the gravest crises to hit
Speaker 2: American signs. Since he wants to humiliate her, Dingle wants
Speaker 2: to pick a fight with Bernardine Healing. Two weeks before
Speaker 2: the hearing, on July nineteenth, nineteen ninety one, two of
Speaker 2: Dingle's staffers went up to the NIH campus in Bethesda,
Speaker 2: just outside of Washington, to meet Bernardine Healey. They were
Speaker 2: laying the trap for the big day. I will say
Speaker 2: that I tried very, very hard to get someone from
Speaker 2: the Dingle camp to give their side of what happened
Speaker 2: that day. Dingall is now retired. I contacted his former
Speaker 2: press person, who promised to help but then vanished. I
Speaker 2: tried repeatedly to reach Dingall through his wife's press person,
Speaker 2: who now handles his press inquiries. She promised to help
Speaker 2: until I told her what I was interested in talking about.
Speaker 2: Then she vanished. Dingle's former chief of staff declined to talk.
Speaker 2: He emailed me. That was about twenty five years ago,
Speaker 2: and my recollections at this point are limited at best,
Speaker 2: which is funny because I have yet to encounter memory
Speaker 2: problems from anyone who was on the receiving end of
Speaker 2: the Dingle staff in those years. So what I'm relying
Speaker 2: on is a meticulously sourced account from Daniel Kevlis, now
Speaker 2: a distinguished historian at Yale who in nineteen ninety eight
Speaker 2: published an exhaustive history of this era. Kevlis tracked down
Speaker 2: as many people as he could who participated in the
Speaker 2: meeting between Healey and Dingle's staff. I'm reading now. They
Speaker 2: asked her about the house she was living in on
Speaker 2: the NIH campus, Did she pay rent? Did she have
Speaker 2: expensive commodes? Commodes I'm quoting again from Kevlis. Healey adds
Speaker 2: that they demeaned the NAH leaders. We were lap dogs,
Speaker 2: not scientific watchdogs, they said. Then they quote gloated unquote
Speaker 2: about having taken down some of the biggest names in science,
Speaker 2: and when Healey pointed out that those scientists hadn't been
Speaker 2: granted anything like due process. They said they didn't care
Speaker 2: because they knew they were guilty. Heally says, they meaning
Speaker 2: the Dingle staffers, behaved like quote thugs, absolute thugs. She
Speaker 2: later told a reporter that they laced their talk with
Speaker 2: four letter words, yelling, screaming insults. Then comes this. One
Speaker 2: of Dingle's men turns to Healey's deputy, who is in
Speaker 2: the meeting, and insinuates that Healey quote had a personal
Speaker 2: relationship unquote with David Baltimore, the Nobel Prize winning scientist
Speaker 2: who had been wrapped up in one of the longest
Speaker 2: and most absurd of the OSI's fraud investigations. I think
Speaker 2: we can be certain that the phrase personal relationship is
Speaker 2: a sanitized version of what was actually said. One of
Speaker 2: Dingle's henchmen goes to the office of one of the
Speaker 2: most senior science officials in the land, a woman of
Speaker 2: principle and dignity and accomplishment, a woman who quotes Saint
Speaker 2: Augustine for goodness sake and in front of her in
Speaker 2: her presence, turns to her male deputy and says, I
Speaker 2: know why she's standing up for Baltimore. She's fucking him.
Speaker 2: Do you know what Healy says when she tells kevlis
Speaker 2: that story, Just how slimmy is that one short sentences
Speaker 2: strong verbs. Two weeks after all this, Bernardine Heally makes
Speaker 2: the track down to Capitol Hill for her scheduled humiliation.
Speaker 2: She waits her turn. She raises her right hand and
Speaker 2: calmly answers question after question about Ramae Sharma's typo and
Speaker 2: the Cleveland Clinic. I would direct you to the exchange
Speaker 2: beginning on page two hundred and twenty three of the transcript,
Speaker 2: where one of Dingle's fellow committee members, Norman Lent, Republican
Speaker 2: of Long Island, starts to question Healey about the signature
Speaker 2: page of Remei Sharma's grant application. As I said at
Speaker 2: the beginning, this hearing was not recorded, but it deserves
Speaker 2: theatrical reenactment.
Speaker 8: Congressman Lent, doctor Healy, there is something about these grand
Speaker 8: applications that intrigues me, particularly Grand Application NS two three
Speaker 8: seven four four oh one, which is the one dated
Speaker 8: February twenty fourth, nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 2: He's talking about Remee Sharma's grant.
Speaker 8: You evidently signed and dated the grand application on February
Speaker 8: twenty second, nineteen eighty nine, while the principal investigator evidently
Speaker 8: did not sign and date the grand application until February
Speaker 8: twenty fourth, nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 2: Lent's point is that when a scientist signs a grant application,
Speaker 2: he or she is testifying that it's true. So if
Speaker 2: Healey signed first, then she was signing onto something before
Speaker 2: it had been certified as true. I guess Lent goes
Speaker 2: on and on, and the room is starting to get restless,
Speaker 2: because the promise of a Dingle hearing is a powerful
Speaker 2: climax when the hammer comes down on some hapless victim.
Speaker 2: But after a long day, all we've got is Congressman
Speaker 2: Lent yammering on about a signature page to someone who
Speaker 2: probably signed hundreds of signature pages a year. Big John
Speaker 2: Dingle up on the dais, looks over it, Lent.
Speaker 9: Would the gentleman yield.
Speaker 2: And then he lunges for healing.
Speaker 9: Why is it that the application was done up? Everything
Speaker 9: was there except the signature of the investigator, and you
Speaker 9: signed it. My problem here is that I see the
Speaker 9: institution signs first, and then the investigator signs. I would
Speaker 9: assume that it would be the investigator that signs and
Speaker 9: then you say everything he says is true, and I
Speaker 9: am relying on the content and my own knowledge, and
Speaker 9: I am also relying on his signature.
Speaker 2: At this point, all of us in the audience realize something.
Speaker 2: This was all Dingle had. He had no case. This
Speaker 2: is congressional theater, and the best he can offer is
Speaker 2: a jesuitical discussion of grant application signing procedures.
Speaker 9: Here you didn't even have the signature.
Speaker 10: If he had signed first and then I had signed,
Speaker 10: you could argue, how could he have signed before I
Speaker 10: gave my assurances that we were going to give him
Speaker 10: the space. Somebody had to sign first.
Speaker 2: Because the hearing has been going on for five hours,
Speaker 2: and she cannot believe that she, Bernardine Healy, is in
Speaker 2: charge of the world's most important medical research institution, and
Speaker 2: she's being forced to sit and be interrogated on the
Speaker 2: sequence of signatures on a grant application that just happened
Speaker 2: to include a completely meaningless typo on page twenty one,
Speaker 2: interrogated by the same man whose lackeys came to her
Speaker 2: office and in front of her made the most violent incasuations.
Speaker 9: The question, though, is why was it you had to
Speaker 9: sign first?
Speaker 10: I didn't have to sign first. This is the way
Speaker 10: it was brought to me.
Speaker 9: He signed second, and you signed first.
Speaker 10: Who's on third?
Speaker 2: And in that moment, as the room erupts in laughter
Speaker 2: and Chairman Dingle's giant bald head turns the color of
Speaker 2: a radish, the spell is broken. Every time I think
Speaker 2: of that moment, I go back to my childhood memories
Speaker 2: of Danny k playing the little boy in the king's
Speaker 2: new clothes. The King is in the y all together,
Speaker 2: the y all together. The Heally goes back to her
Speaker 2: office and she says, that's it. From now on, if
Speaker 2: you've been accused of scientific fraud by the NAH, you
Speaker 2: have the right to an appeal, meaning no more conclusions
Speaker 2: leaked to the press before the accused is a chance
Speaker 2: to respond. You can take your case to a panel
Speaker 2: of judges and lo and behold. Once the accused had
Speaker 2: a chance to defend themselves, the cases against them fell apart.
Speaker 2: The Appeals Board said, in the Remeis Sharma case, it's
Speaker 2: a typo. Heally called him up.
Speaker 5: Ramesh. Truth always events, You are honest, and you won.
Speaker 2: The NIH stops persecuting its grantees. The case against David
Speaker 2: Baltimore gets thrown out. The OSI drops its case against
Speaker 2: the Georgetown scientist Marguerite Hamish Mika Popovic, the AIDS researcher
Speaker 2: who was hounded out of his job over the meaning
Speaker 2: of the abbreviation ND, was vindicated. The verdict against him
Speaker 2: was thrown out by Healey's Appeals Board. With this choice line,
Speaker 2: one might anticipate that from all this evidence, after all
Speaker 2: the sound and fury, there would be at least a
Speaker 2: residue of palpable wrongdoing. That is not the case.
Speaker 4: I went to her and said, we need a private
Speaker 4: meeting with John Dingle. I'm going to set it up.
Speaker 5: Will you go?
Speaker 4: She said yes, called a friend, who called a friend,
Speaker 4: got a private meeting with John Dingle, and she and
Speaker 4: I went.
Speaker 2: Healy's right hand, Johanna Schneider, sought a truce. Dingle was
Speaker 2: the most powerful man in Congress, and heally wanted to
Speaker 2: double the budget of the NAH. She needed him. But
Speaker 2: you can imagine how it went. The unstoppable force and
Speaker 2: the immovable object.
Speaker 4: She made it clear that his people were pushing too
Speaker 4: hard on things that didn't matter, and you know, he
Speaker 4: kind of dismissed. He didn't dismiss her, but you know,
Speaker 4: he didn't engage on the topic, and so she went
Speaker 4: back to it.
Speaker 2: Oh, she kept on saying yes.
Speaker 4: And you know, I'm sitting at my heart's meeting. I
Speaker 4: just I you know, I thought the world of her,
Speaker 4: and I thought she could charm him again. But she wasn't.
Speaker 4: That wasn't her agenda.
Speaker 2: So you're sitting there and you're you're really really worried.
Speaker 2: She's gonna she's going to stick the nails again.
Speaker 4: She didn't have the same agenda I had, and she
Speaker 4: was gonna let him know, you know, that he was
Speaker 4: making a mistake. And I guess Bernadine was the one
Speaker 4: who was going to say no more, this stops here.
Speaker 2: Before the meeting ended, Joanna Schneider took a picture of
Speaker 2: the two of them, Dingle and Heally. Schneider showed it
Speaker 2: to me. Heally has a big smile, Dingle looks like
Speaker 2: a stuck pig. Heally could have let it pass. Men
Speaker 2: did fences a little bowing and scraping before the king,
Speaker 2: but she didn't. Because the only way that hysterias end
Speaker 2: is when someone has the courage to say enough, Why
Speaker 2: do I love Bernadine Healy Because she showed us how
Speaker 2: it's done.
Speaker 4: The next day she sends me a huge bouquet of
Speaker 4: flowers and she says, maybe Thelma and Louise lived happily
Speaker 4: ever after after all, which was darling.
Speaker 2: What does she mean that you guys with Alma Louise
Speaker 2: and you drove off the cliff.
Speaker 4: See? And the reason I tell you that story is
Speaker 4: she You know, she saw her. She was on a mission,
Speaker 4: and for the people who worked for her, for the
Speaker 4: people around her, you could really get caught up in
Speaker 4: the best way, in the right way. You were caught
Speaker 4: up in it, and you thought you could change the
Speaker 4: world with her. I always felt like the world was
Speaker 4: a safer place with Bernard and Heliamat.
Speaker 2: Revisionous History is a panoply production. The senior producer is
Speaker 2: Mia LaBelle, with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista. Our editor
Speaker 2: is Julia Barton. Flon Williams is our engineer. Fact checking
Speaker 2: by Beth Johnson, original music by Luis Gierra and special
Speaker 2: thanks to our Revisionist History players Jody marcal Ken Marx
Speaker 2: and Long Island's finest Mike Pesca, and thanks as always
Speaker 2: to Andy Bauers and Jacob Iceberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, let.
Speaker 8: Me repeat the question. What do you understand your liability
Speaker 8: would be if your certification was erroneous.
Speaker 10: My understanding is that if I told the truth at
Speaker 10: the time that I signed them, I would have no liability.
Speaker 8: Let me help you out. I think what you're trying
Speaker 8: to say is if you sign the paper and it
Speaker 8: contained false statements, and you didn't willfully make the false statement,
Speaker 8: there would be no liability.
Speaker 10: I made no false statements, mister Lent.
Speaker 8: You made no false statements wilfully, I think is what
Speaker 8: you want to set.
Speaker 10: Mister Lent. When an institutional official signs a grant application,
Speaker 10: they sign as a partner with the investigator. The major
Speaker 10: responsibility of the institutional official is to say, yes, we
Speaker 10: are agreeing that this grant be submitted, and we will
Speaker 10: provide the resources that are necessary to see that this
Speaker 10: grant is done.
Speaker 8: My point is, Doctor, Indeed, if.
Speaker 10: You are saying that any institutional official that signs a
Speaker 10: grant is certifying that they are one hundred percent sure
Speaker 10: that everything in that grant is perfect, I don't think
Speaker 10: you will have any institutional official signing any of our
Speaker 10: twenty thousand NIH grants that are currently funded.
Speaker 8: In view of the fact that you had certified as
Speaker 8: to the truthfulness of the statements in the grand application
Speaker 8: in the first place, I.
Speaker 10: Did not certify to the truthfulness. I said, to the
Speaker 10: best of my knowledge, those grant applications are correct. I
Speaker 10: have no way of certifying to their truthfulness.
Speaker 8: I don't want to overdo this. I read it once.
Speaker 8: A willfully false certification is a criminal offense. I was
Speaker 8: trying to help you there before when I said, what
Speaker 8: you are saying is that if it is not a
Speaker 8: willful misstatement, there would be no liability on your pot.
Speaker 10: I wasn't even aware that there was a misstatement. I'm
Speaker 10: not sure I understand this case is still open, mister Lent.
Speaker 10: The jury is still out on this case.