WHISTLEBLOWER CASE AGAINST HARVARD ALZHEIMERS RESEARCHER SET FOR TRIAL

A prominent Harvard Medical School researcher, The Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham & Women’s Hospital are accused of falsifying data to obtain a massive government research grant and their case is set for trial in the federal court soon. A whistleblower Kenneth Jones, who is a former statistician at massachusetts General Hospital filed suit under The False Claims Act, a whistleblower statute allowing him to collect a partion of what the government recovers. He alleges that the defendants violated the law by including false statements in a $15 million grant application to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The lawsuit accusus Marilyn Albert a former professor of Psychiatry at harvard Med of manipulating data saying that the results of a trial were scientifically significant when in fact they were not. Albert is now director of the Division of Cognitive Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of medicine. Albert’s research was part of an ongoing investigation into the structure of the brain as it progresses towards Alzheimer’s disease. The hope is to predict years in advance who is likely to develop the disease based on measurements taken over time of certain regions of the brain. The results of the trial in question were published in the scientific journal Annals of Neurology in April 2000 and according to Jones, this article proved extremely influential. The data appeared to confirm what had been suspected by other prominenet Alzheimer’s scientists, that the disease reduces blood flow to the brain. In march 2001 he discovered what he believed to be faults in the research, particularly the data produced by one of the researchers, Ronald Killiany. The lawsuit says that Killiany revised his initial MRI measurements to prove the hypothesis of the scientific trial. The defense says that it was not unusual to re-measure the patient brain scans as long as he remained “blind” to the clilnical status of the participants. The case is U.S. ex. rel Jones v. Brigham and Women’s Hospital et al 1st Circuit Court of Appeals No: 10-2301.