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