Soccer Dad

Dingell-ling

There's been a lot of speculation about the incoming Democratic committee chairmen. Unfortunately one who's ascension has been little commented on is John Dingell of Michigan who will be heading the House Energy & Commerce Committee.

The incoming Judiciary Committee chairman, Dingell's colleague from Michigan, has gotten quite a bit of attention especially in this post by my friend Daled Amos. And of course who would head the Intelligence committee was a controversy until Rep Pelosi chose Rep Silvestre Reyes.

Dingell has escaped scrutiny but it's hard to understand why. During the 1980's he was involved in the naked abuse of his position. Funny but people don't remember.

At issue was a paper written by a researcher at MIT, Dr. Thereza Imanishi-Kari. According to a review of a book on this incident, the story started like this.

As Daniel J. Kevles recounts in The Baltimore Case, the story began with Margot O'Toole, a young scientist doing research in the lab of Thereza Imanishi-Kari, one of Baltimore's MIT colleagues. Imanishi-Kari, Baltimore, and others had published a paper in the journal Cell with unexpected findings on how the immune system rearranges itself to produce antibodies against a microbial invader it is seeing for the first time. O'Toole was trying without success to repeat aspects of the research when she stumbled across data scrawled in a laboratory notebook that suggested to her the Cell study was wrong. Before long, O'Toole came to believe that the errors were deliberate. What had begun as a question of error became an allegation of fraud and scientific misconduct directed at Imanishi-Kari.

The charges were examined by researchers at MIT and at Tufts University, where Imanishi-Kari had been offered a job as an assistant professor. In the course of those discussions, Imanishi-Kari discovered that there were several mistakes in the paper, although none of them affected its conclusions. Baltimore suggested experiments that might be done to settle the questions.

From NIH, the matter caught the attention of staffer to Rep Dingell and he started his harrassment of Dr. Baltimore. Dr. Baltimore a respected scientist at the time, left MIT to take a position as president of Rockefeller University but after a year Dingell's manufactured controversy undercut his support and forced him to resign.

A scorching NIH condemnation of Imanishi-Kari and Baltimore was based on innuendo and hearsay, Kevles says. Furthermore, Imanishi-Kari and Baltimore had none of the due-process protections they would have had in a court of law. Dingell's investigators, Kevles says, tainted the investigation with press leaks. And the press simply regurgitated what it was handed, without probing the merits of the case.

In the midst of all of this, Baltimore was named president of Rockefeller University in New York, one of the nation's leading research universities. A little more than a year later, however, he was forced to resign when he lost the support of a crucial segment of the senior faculty. Throughout the 10-year ordeal, Kevles notes, Baltimore received almost no support from his scientific colleagues. Some of his closest friends turned against him, denouncing him in public.

Paul Gigot in a column originally published in 1989 wrote about how Baltimore must have felt.

Imagine that you won a Nobel Prize at age 37. That you've published some 400 papers on genetics and the human immune system. That you've built from scratch a highly respected scientific research center, the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass.

And then imagine that you wake up one morning and read in the hometown paper that you're accused of what "appears to be fraud and . . . misrepresentation." The accusation is from a "Pete Stockton," whom you've never met, but who the paper says is a "staff member for Rep. John Dingell."

In retrospect Baltimore had this to say

The first thing to say is that I look back with some pride at my decision to support a powerless junior colleague and to stand up to the harassment from Rep. John Dingell's (D-Mich.) committee. During the course of my saga, the Republicans took control of the House and Dingell was relegated to the minority, blunting his enormous power. Had the judgment of the HHS review panel come down while Dingell was still in power, I have no idea how he would have responded, but I shudder to think of what he might have done. Although I have made some attempts at reconciliation, I have never heard from him or any of his henchmen. I did receive an editorial apology of sorts, headlined "Rush to Judgment," from the New York Times, which I greatly appreciated.

Will the Baltimore case make the media any more wary when Rep Dingell uses his position to intimidate targets? The lack of scrutiny he's received as he's set to return to his old position is not encouraging. Dingell abused his position and did not pay the price for harming science and, more importantly, a man's reputation.

There is of course nothing illegal about that. In Congress, it's just business as usual.

Blogdigger tags: John Dingell, David Baltimore, Abuse of Power.