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