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Friday, March 18, 2005

EVERYTHING YOU KNOW
ABOUT MENOPAUSE
IS WRONG



PROFESSOR CHARGED WITH FAKING GRANT INFO

By LISA RATHKE, Associated Press Writer

BURLINGTON, Vt. - A former medical school professor was accused Thursday of fabricating research data on closely watched topics such as menopause, aging and hormone supplements to win millions of dollars in grant money from the federal government.


Prosecutors said Eric T. Poehlman, 49, a former tenured professor at the University of Vermont College of Medicine, would fabricate his research to make his proposals look more intriguing, in the hope that the government would be more likely to dole out grants to him.

"Dr. Poehlman fraudulently diverted millions of dollars from Public Health Service to support his research projects," U.S. Attorney David V. Kirby said Thursday. "This in turn siphoned millions of dollars from the pool of resources available for valid scientific research proposals. As this prosecution provides, such conduct will not be tolerated."

Poehlman has agreed to plead guilty to federal charges of making false statements in an application for a $542,000 grant he received, federal prosecutors said. He faces up to five years in prison. He is also barred by the federal government from receiving Public Health Research funds and must retract or correct 10 articles.

Poehlman is accused of requesting $11.6 million in federal funding using false data. Although he did not receive many of the grants, the National Institutes of Health (news - web sites) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (news - web sites) used $2.9 million in research funding based on the faulty applications, prosecutors said.

His lawyer, Robert B. Hemley, said Thursday that he was unwilling to comment on the case until at least after the sentencing.

In a paper on published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 1995, Poehlman said he had tested 35 healthy women and retested the same women six years later in the "The Longitudinal Menopause Study: 1994-2000" when he actually falsified and fabricated test results for 32 of the women.

In applications for federal grants, Poehlman lied about the number of subjects he had tested in "The Longitudinal Study of Aging: 1996-2000" and changed the data about their physical characteristics and test results to create trends that did not occur in the research.

Poehlman also made up the results from a 1999-2000 Hormone Replacement Therapy study to seek federal funding.

UVM started to investigate Poehlman in December of 2000 when one of his research assistants accused him of scientific misconduct.

During the two-year investigation, Poehlman deleted electronic evidence of his falsifications, presented false testimony and documents and influenced other witnesses to provide false documents, the U.S. attorney's office said.

Poehlman resigned from the medical school in 2001 and moved to Montreal, Canada to work as a researcher. He has since left his job in Canada.

Poehlman has also agreed to pay $180,000 to settle a civil complaint. ’

******************

POEHLMAN UPDATE: Today’s Boston Globe calls this “the worst case of scientific fakery to come to light in two decades.”

Here’s a crucial part of the problem: The lab assistant who blew the whistle ‘says that at least four University of Vermont researchers told him privately that they had concerns as well about some of Poehlman's work. However, no one else had spoken up to university authorities. "I was in a unique position to act. …I did not rely on Dr. Poehlman for funding, a post doc [research position], or a salary." …The University of Vermont took DeNino's accusations seriously, he said, but he quickly realized the difficulty of being a whistle-blower against someone as powerful as Poehlman. Other colleagues in Poehlman's lab doubted DeNino's claims, while Poehlman's attorney threatened to sue him if he spoke against Poehlman outside of the investigation.’