Only a bit. When push came to shove, he chose his career over stopping the fraud being used to (mis-)treat patients, who suffered for another couple of years, becuase he manifestly did not blow the whistle when Duke went into cover-up mode.
His 3rd year was already blown (and that sort of thing happens when you get in the lab of an incompetent†); instead of putting the interests of the patients first, he submitted a false affidavit to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in a go along, get along attempt to get funding to redo his 3rd year (I surmise from the article that he was unsuccessful).
I'd be a lot easier on him if this wasn't feeding into patient care at the same exact time he was reporting this. I don't insist every scientist who discovers "misconduct" do a Margaret O'Toole† and move from the lab to answering phones for her brother's moving company (Gentle Giant, they were great in the early '90s), but there was a lot more at stake than research that would get invalidated in due course as people tried to build upon it.
I suppose it's only fitting that currently his life is being turned upside down as a star witness for the inevitable lawsuits.
† I had a girlfriend who found it impossible to do undergraduate research (UROP) in Imanishi-Kari's lab, it was very poorly run. I doubt Imanishi-Kari committed fraud then, just shoddy, incorrect research, but per the Secret Service, the government's experts on paper and inks, she certainly did when the investigation got serious.
I think it's important to point to the best person in the room and say, be more like that guy. He may not be a paragon of scientific values, but at least he's well above the rest.
You're basically asking the junior developer to question all the senior developers, the lead developers, and the executive managers. There is only so many people a person can say are wrong. It's not possible for him to know everything, for all he knew he was wrong, and the professors were merely unwilling to take the time to explain it (or bring in an outside professor to explain it). That smelled wrong enough for him to get out, but he probably had a nagging thought in the back of his mind that he simply didn't understand.
Nope, what he found was very clear, enough that he felt compelled to remove his name from all that the laboratory was doing, in part to protect his reputation, and to completely abandon this attempt at his 3rd year in med school with no guarantee he'd get funding for a retry. He outlined this in a 3 page document that other uninvolved scientists have found very impressive, and that is clearly, along with his depositions providing a major foundation for the current legal case(s) (Duke has big pockets and very dirty hands, this is not going to end well for them). He was being very certain in my book.
There's also the responses of the PI and the PI's mentor. A real scientist doesn't take such questions as "a personal insult" as the now almost completely disgraced PI did (state medical boards that are desperate like North Dakota will still license the PI as a doctor, at last count). The PI's mentor wasn't that sort of unprofessional, but the article says he didn't respond well to this. Note also one of the Duke higher ups, apparently unprompted, introduced the word "misconduct" in all this.
If you're going to be a "life and death doctor" as I put it, for him one of the harshest examples of that, oncology, you're going to be making a lot of decisions that patients lives hinge on. A degree of certainty and decisiveness, what some call doctors' "God Complex", is required. I judge that he was sufficiently certain in his judgement of the research, and its implications for patients being treated based on it at the time. It's that last bit that I believe requires you to go above and beyond in determining if you're correct or not, and then doing what's right for the patients.
He went above and beyond the call of duty in what he did. At some point the people whose job it is to actually handle matters like this, like the deans, need to act.
He was training to be a doctor. One of those who takes the Hippocratic Oath to essentially "First do no harm". I expect more from doctors (and nurses; my mom was an RN, and I was close to some doctors for social and business reasons when I was in middle and high school).
It's the false affidavit that makes this crystal clear to me. He knew the situation was a lot worse than he stated in it---and note that at least as this article is framed, he allowed himself to be silenced.
She quit that career when she was pregnant with me, the eldest of 4, in 1960.
My relationship with those doctors ended when I went to college in 1979, and my family transitioned out of that business in the early '80s. So except what we read, and learn from and experience with our doctors, we're as out of touch with the modern medical scene. For that matter, since I'm disabled, and my parents are old, we're all on Medicare, which has it's own weird rules.
So, no front row seat.
I would say "nice try", except for the epic failure in reading comprehension in your rush to DISQUALIFY me.
His 3rd year was already blown (and that sort of thing happens when you get in the lab of an incompetent†); instead of putting the interests of the patients first, he submitted a false affidavit to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in a go along, get along attempt to get funding to redo his 3rd year (I surmise from the article that he was unsuccessful).
I'd be a lot easier on him if this wasn't feeding into patient care at the same exact time he was reporting this. I don't insist every scientist who discovers "misconduct" do a Margaret O'Toole† and move from the lab to answering phones for her brother's moving company (Gentle Giant, they were great in the early '90s), but there was a lot more at stake than research that would get invalidated in due course as people tried to build upon it.
I suppose it's only fitting that currently his life is being turned upside down as a star witness for the inevitable lawsuits.
† I had a girlfriend who found it impossible to do undergraduate research (UROP) in Imanishi-Kari's lab, it was very poorly run. I doubt Imanishi-Kari committed fraud then, just shoddy, incorrect research, but per the Secret Service, the government's experts on paper and inks, she certainly did when the investigation got serious.