Strong Verbs, Short Sentences

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.

00:00:19
Speaker 2: The following podcast contains explicit language. August first, nineteen ninety one, Washington, d C. One of those sweltering DC summer days, Room twenty three to twenty two of the Rayburn House Office building, the big grand Congressional building right across from the Capitol. It's packed press, lawyers aids, a long row of congressman up on the dais, and in the chairman's seat is John Dingall, Democrat of Michigan, A big man, well pass six feet gruff, intimidating, giant bald head, thick black glasses, a bouncer in a business suit. In his heyday, Dingle was perhaps hups 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 a transcript. Dingle begins. It is the practice of this subcommittee, since it was first constituted by Sam Rayburn in nineteen fifty eight, 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 our 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. And 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 Bernardine Healy. I remember it well. I was there.

00:02:57
Speaker 3: My parents, and particularly my father, thought it was wonderful for a woman to be a doctor.

00:03:04
Speaker 2: The story of how the panic over science fraud ended revolves around three people, Congressman John Dingle, a brilliant scientist named Remey Sharma, and Bernardin Heey. Bernardin Heely 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 Healey in an interview a few years after she left the NIH when she was head of the American Red Cross.

00:03:33
Speaker 3: 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.

00:03:52
Speaker 2: Heally grew up in a little apartment in Queen's 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.

00:04:07
Speaker 3: When I went to Harvard Medical School, roughly ten percent less than ten percent of the class were women. And in those days, although they probably don't like to remember this, medical schools head 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.

00:04:37
Speaker 2: When Heally 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 Bernard and Healely was not cut out to be bossed around by anyone. She liked to quote Saint Augustine. She cut her own hair, she wore a scott of suits.

00:04:59
Speaker 4: She was brilliant and I've worked for a lot of really wonderful and accomplished people.

00:05:05
Speaker 2: This is Joanna Schneider, who was Healey's right hand during her years at the NAH.

00:05:10
Speaker 4: She could take a problem and sift through it quickly and come up with a couple of solutions, very very very brightly, 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.

00:05:43
Speaker 2: Tell me more so describe for listeners who have never may never have refer seen the picture of her.

00:05:51
Speaker 4: Let's see. Bernardine 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.

00:06:07
Speaker 2: I talked to someone else who worked with Heally 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, twenty five years ago. And what struck me is that he used the present tense in describing her, even though Healey has been dead for years. He said, her influence on me is everlasting.

00:06:35
Speaker 4: Her first instinct was always fairness and justice, and I just she was my father.

00:06:43
Speaker 5: My father was.

00:06:46
Speaker 4: All about fairness and justice. She is a mix of Joan of Arc, Madame Curie, and Florence Nightingale. You know, she's all Repta in a scotta. Absolutely absolutely.

00:07:06
Speaker 2: I met Heally 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.

00:07:21
Speaker 4: She had a wooden sign on her desk that said strong verbs, short sentences, and that was Bernie Back.

00:07:35
Speaker 2: When Healey was on the faculty of Johns Hopkins Medical School, there was an all male eating club called the Pittotomy Club. They had an annual comedy show, and one year the mainskit consisted of a man dressed in a long blonde wig, fishnet stockings, and coconut half brazier performing pornographic acts on other physicians at the hospital. It was supposed to be Healy. Heally 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, Bernardine, 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 Bernardine Patricia Healey disciple of fairness and justice. She forces a face to face with the officers of the club. Heally 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 character. We're talking about an incident from nineteen eighty two. Mind you, Heally 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 ninety five percent 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. Yeah, what was she what was on her mind when she first started the Nah, what is it she wanted to do?

00:09:30
Speaker 4: And she just said, women have been locked out of clinical trials. They've you know, they've 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 NIAH, and we're going to open science up, We're going to change it. We're going to double our budget. Wow, okay.

00:10:08
Speaker 2: What was the reception within? And I aged her cold? Cold, cold?

00:10:15
Speaker 4: Why chili? They thought she was just being too aggressive, to pushy, and you could feel it in the meetings, you could feel it in the halls.

00:10:28
Speaker 2: How does she react to that chili reception?

00:10:32
Speaker 4: 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 and 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.

00:11:01
Speaker 2: At the risk of stating the obvious, you really don't want to pick a fight with Bernardine Healy.

00:11:08
Speaker 5: Does Vaughn and nineteen thirty five December. At that time British sales ruled REMAE.

00:11:14
Speaker 2: Sharma, the second character in this story. Sharma came to America in nineteen sixty. 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 ninety five 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. Remay Sharma found the body's second interstate. In the late nineteen eighties, 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 Bernardine Healey. Before she moves to the nih, he comes, starts work, and one day in the spring of nineteen ninety he comes back from lunch and gets a message He's wanted in Healey'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 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 NAH many thousands of words, a small portion of which concerns two proteins, Alpha two A and Alpha two GC. And on page twenty one of the grant application, he has a line where he says, he did such and such work with alpha two GC, and it isn't true. He hasn't done that particular work with alpha two GC. So the OSI says that's fraud, but Sharma says, no, it isn't.

00:13:47
Speaker 5: When I was diving and I do not much diving, so I would consult with my wife. She how how I can do and so forth these emissions. Let me help you, So she helped.

00:14:00
Speaker 2: Me This is the late nineteen eighties. 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 one hundred and thirty times. So Sharma's wife programmed shortcut keystrokes for each of those two proteins. Shama showed me how it worked on an actual keyboard. Or they were side by side.

00:14:27
Speaker 5: Side and she put side by side. Yeah, she could twelve the macross the two keys side by side. And he says, when I needed alpha two A, press this, and I needed al for two GC appress this, and that is how I kept on doing.

00:14:42
Speaker 2: But on page twenty one of the Grand Application, Sharma's wife made a mistake a typo. She hit the alpha two GC key when she meant to hit the alpha two A 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?

00:15:03
Speaker 5: You tell me that that is what I have been asking them all over and the iost the same thing two appeals more. Can you magine in a document of thirty nine are paging two grants for seventy eight pages, the only fine single typographical.

00:15:20
Speaker 2: Raaler seventy eight 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.

00:15:35
Speaker 5: At at the airport, they asked me terrible questions, and in talibrable. When they asked me some terrible questions, I think they started to really bully me.

00:15:46
Speaker 2: 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 and anger.

00:16:06
Speaker 5: I said, you yourself are dnamost turney even didn't know I saw it. Are you yourself done a mistake here? Now you have put wrong year, one year wrong. You can do a mistake, and you are trying to take me to the goals with one typographical subscript. There didn't answer me and then they left.

00:16:31
Speaker 2: Sharma's contract at the Cleveland Clinic was not renewed. Doors that were once opened to him were closed.

00:16:39
Speaker 5: I was stained and I never recovered. My wife Satra mesh All. What you did recame from India and originally in nineteen sixty is all gone down with Those are the consequences, and here we are talking about him today. I still get emotional about it.

00:17:06
Speaker 2: 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 fear over Sharma's typo, Bernardine 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.

00:17:48
Speaker 1: I'm proud of the little things I've been able to do while I've been here, and I'm to eat proud or even still more of the people that I've been able to serve and help.

00:18:00
Speaker 2: John Dingle, the third character in this story. Dingle is Washington Royalty. His father, John Dingall Senior, was elected to Congress in nineteen thirty three. As a kid, Dingall was a Congressional page. When his dad died in nineteen fifty five, Dingle ran for the family seat and won. He served until twenty fifteen, almost sixty years, and when he retired, his wife, Debbie, ran for his seat and won, meaning that we are now in the ninth decade of Dingle's occupying that chair in the House. During the long years when the Democrats controlled Congress, Dingall was as powerful as anyone in Washington, and his self assumed role was congressional watchdog, scourge of fraud and abuse.

00:18:51
Speaker 6: When I was chairman of the Commresce Committee, I was also a chairman of the Oversight Investigations Committee, and I was, I think one of the better investigators they've ever had here.

00:19:01
Speaker 2: This is Dingall in an interview with the Edward M. Kennedy Institute a few years ago.

00:19:07
Speaker 6: Sure was a bad year when we didn't make defense contractors give back a million a billion to two 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.

00:19:37
Speaker 2: Dingle'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 Dingle grams, 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 staff had sent him in a year and a half, one hundred and seventy five. One hundred and seventy five. Romeo and Juliet did not send each other one hundred and seventy five letters, and each of those one hundred and seventy five letters required immediate attention. They would accuse the FDA of not being tough enough on the pharmaceutical industry. Then when the FDA got tough, Dingle would write them letters accusing him of being too tough on the industry.

00:20:35
Speaker 4: He was sort of the scourge of the NIH and his staff used to write us letters all the time saying what about this.

00:20:43
Speaker 2: I want to see that John Dingell and his staff did not pursue a coherent ideological agenda. They were just bullies. Johanna Schneider remembers Dingle looming over Healey's time at NIH.

00:20:56
Speaker 4: 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 Dingall was she just felt like, this is politics, This isn't science, this is I'm not going to do this anymore.

00:21:25
Speaker 2: The Office of Scientific Integrity at the NIH, the group responsible for science fraud investigations, answered to Dingle. Sometimes people at the OSI would simply transfer to Dingle 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 Dingle'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. Dingle was the fuel.

00:21:57
Speaker 7: People were afraid, John Denk, and I think that made an enormous difference.

00:22:04
Speaker 2: That's Joe Onic. He was one of Rames Sharma's lawyers, a leader in the small group who spent the early nineties 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 said how they got away with that for so long, John Dingall, you think it's just all John Dix.

00:22:26
Speaker 7: I think that they had protection, and they could they knew they had protection, or I don't know how much they work aware of it in them most kinds of that. They understood they had protection, and I think they felt that they could get away with it.

00:22:46
Speaker 2: So Bernardine Healy thinks that the science fraud investigations are out of control, and she moves in to restore some kind of sanity. Dingle hears about her plan. He isn't happy. Thus, the hearing of August first, nineteen ninety one, Dingle invites two people from the OSI to give his side of the story, and then he lines up everyone in Healey's chain of command, her boss, her deputy, her legal counsel, and of course her. Over the course of the day, Dingle will slowly build the case against her. She will testify last when the trap is good and ready. And what's the trap? Ramee Sharma? Heally 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 signs. Since he wants to humiliate her, Dingle wants to pick a fight with Bernardine Healing. Two weeks before the hearing, on July nineteenth, nineteen ninety one, two of Dingle's staffers went up to the NIH campus in Bethesda, just outside of Washington, to meet Bernardine Healey. They were laying the trap for the big day. I will say that I tried very, very hard to get someone from the Dingle camp to give their side of what happened that day. Dingall is now retired. I contacted his former press person, who promised to help but then vanished. I tried repeatedly to reach Dingall 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. Dingle's former chief of staff declined to talk. He emailed me. That was about twenty five 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 Kevlis, now a distinguished historian at Yale who in nineteen ninety eight published an exhaustive history of this era. Kevlis tracked down as many people as he could who participated in the meeting between Healey and Dingle'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 Kevlis. Healey adds that they demeaned the NAH leaders. We were lap dogs, not scientific watchdogs, they said. Then they quote gloated unquote about having taken down some of the biggest names in science, and when Healey 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. Heally 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 Dingle's men turns to Healey's deputy, who is in the meeting, and insinuates that Healey quote had a personal relationship unquote with David Baltimore, the Nobel Prize winning scientist who had 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 Dingle'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 Saint 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 kevlis that story, Just how slimmy is that one short sentences strong verbs. Two weeks after all this, Bernardine Heally makes the track down to Capitol Hill for her scheduled humiliation. She waits her turn. She raises her right hand and calmly answers question after question about Ramae Sharma's typo and the Cleveland Clinic. I would direct you to the exchange beginning on page two hundred and twenty three of the transcript, where one of Dingle's fellow committee members, Norman Lent, Republican of Long Island, starts to question Healey about the signature page of Remei Sharma's grant application. As I said at the beginning, this hearing was not recorded, but it deserves theatrical reenactment.

00:28:19
Speaker 8: Congressman Lent, doctor Healy, there is something about these grand applications that intrigues me, particularly Grand Application NS two three seven four four oh one, which is the one dated February twenty fourth, nineteen eighty nine.

00:28:34
Speaker 2: He's talking about Remee Sharma's grant.

00:28:37
Speaker 8: You evidently signed and dated the grand application on February twenty second, nineteen eighty nine, while the principal investigator evidently did not sign and date the grand application until February twenty fourth, nineteen eighty nine.

00:28:51
Speaker 2: Lent's point is that when a scientist signs a grant application, he or she is testifying that it's true. So if Healey signed first, then she was signing onto 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 Dingle 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 Dingle up on the dais, looks over it, Lent.

00:29:32
Speaker 9: Would the gentleman yield.

00:29:35
Speaker 2: And then he lunges for healing.

00:29:38
Speaker 9: 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 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.

00:30:05
Speaker 2: At this point, all of us in the audience realize something. This was all Dingle had. He had no case. This is congressional theater, and the best he can offer is a jesuitical discussion of grant application signing procedures.

00:30:21
Speaker 9: Here you didn't even have the signature.

00:30:25
Speaker 10: 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.

00:30:39
Speaker 2: Because the hearing has been going on for five hours, and she cannot believe that she, Bernardine 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 twenty one, interrogated by the same man whose lackeys came to her office and in front of her made the most violent incasuations.

00:31:10
Speaker 9: The question, though, is why was it you had to sign first?

00:31:16
Speaker 10: I didn't have to sign first. This is the way it was brought to me.

00:31:21
Speaker 9: He signed second, and you signed first.

00:31:25
Speaker 10: Who's on third?

00:31:32
Speaker 2: 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 k playing the little boy in the king's new clothes. The King is in the y all together, the y all together. The Heally goes back to her office and she says, that's it. From now on, if you've been accused of scientific fraud by the NAH, you have the right to an appeal, meaning no more conclusions leaked to the press before the accused is 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 Remeis Sharma case, it's a typo. Heally called him up.

00:32:32
Speaker 5: Ramesh. Truth always events, You are honest, and you won.

00:32:41
Speaker 2: The NIH stops persecuting its grantees. The case against David Baltimore gets thrown out. The OSI drops its case against the Georgetown scientist Marguerite 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 Healey'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.

00:33:18
Speaker 4: I went to her and said, we need a private meeting with John Dingle. I'm going to set it up.

00:33:24
Speaker 5: Will you go?

00:33:25
Speaker 4: She said yes, called a friend, who called a friend, got a private meeting with John Dingle, and she and I went.

00:33:33
Speaker 2: Healy's right hand, Johanna Schneider, sought a truce. Dingle was the most powerful man in Congress, and heally wanted to double the budget of the NAH. She needed him. But you can imagine how it went. The unstoppable force and the immovable object.

00:33:49
Speaker 4: 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.

00:34:13
Speaker 2: Oh, she kept on saying yes.

00:34:15
Speaker 4: And you know, I'm sitting at my heart's meeting. I just I 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.

00:34:29
Speaker 2: So you're sitting there and you're you're really really worried. She's gonna she's going to stick the nails again.

00:34:35
Speaker 4: She didn't have the same agenda I had, and she was gonna 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.

00:34:51
Speaker 2: Before the meeting ended, Joanna Schneider took a picture of the two of them, Dingle and Heally. Schneider showed it to me. Heally has a big smile, Dingle looks like a stuck pig. Heally could have let it pass. Men did 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.

00:35:30
Speaker 4: 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.

00:35:44
Speaker 2: What does she mean that you guys with Alma Louise and you drove off the cliff.

00:35:51
Speaker 4: 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 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 Bernard and Heliamat.

00:36:33
Speaker 2: Revisionous History is a panoply production. The senior producer is Mia LaBelle, with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flon Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson, original music by Luis Gierra and special thanks to our Revisionist History players Jody marcal Ken Marx and Long Island's finest Mike Pesca, and thanks as always to Andy Bauers and Jacob Iceberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, let.

00:37:11
Speaker 8: Me repeat the question. What do you understand your liability would be if your certification was erroneous.

00:37:23
Speaker 10: My understanding is that if I told the truth at the time that I signed them, I would have no liability.

00:37:30
Speaker 8: Let me help you out. I think what you're trying to say is if you sign the paper and it contained false statements, and you didn't willfully make the false statement, there would be no liability.

00:37:40
Speaker 10: I made no false statements, mister Lent.

00:37:44
Speaker 8: You made no false statements wilfully, I think is what you want to set.

00:37:48
Speaker 10: Mister 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.

00:38:07
Speaker 8: My point is, Doctor, Indeed, if.

00:38:10
Speaker 10: You are saying that any institutional official that signs a grant is certifying that they are one hundred percent sure that everything in that grant is perfect, I don't think you will have any institutional official signing any of our twenty thousand NIH grants that are currently funded.

00:38:31
Speaker 8: In view of the fact that you had certified as to the truthfulness of the statements in the grand application in the first place, I.

00:38:39
Speaker 10: Did not certify to the truthfulness. I said, to the best of my knowledge, those grant applications are correct. I have no way of certifying to their truthfulness.

00:38:49
Speaker 8: 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 pot.

00:39:10
Speaker 10: I wasn't even aware that there was a misstatement. I'm not sure I understand this case is still open, mister Lent. The jury is still out on this case.