Schatten's Tangled Web

Administrators at the University of Pittsburgh don’t need lessons from the spinmeisters in the White House when it comes to releasing bad news. First, do it late on Friday so it will appear in the Saturday papers, the least read paper of the week. Then, spin it in the best possible light while burying the most significant findings.

The news in question is the university’s special investigative panel finding that stem cell researcher Gerald Schatten played a key role in writing disgraced South Korean researcher Hwang Woo-Suk’s fraudulent embryonic stem cell paper; that he lobbied Science magazine to publish the paper; that he took cash and research support for his efforts; that he sought an annual retainer for future collaborations; and, in an element of the UPitt report that I haven’t seen reported elsewhere, that Schatten relied on Hwang’s alleged discoveries for his own patent application, while not crediting – if that’s the proper word when the whole thing is a sham – Hwang.

According to the university report released on Friday, the panel of six senior investigators – several of whom “had participated with Dr. Schatten in research projects and in funded grants” – did not find Schatten’s behavior rose to the level of scientific fraud.

They could only reach that conclusion by taking a pretty narrow view of what constitutes fraud. Like many leading researchers in the stem cell field, Schatten is in a scramble for funds to support his lab because of the Bush administration’s limits on embryonic stem cell research, which is one of the more promising areas of this still exploratory field. But that doesn’t explain why he took $40,000 in honoraria from the South Korean scientist, including a $10,000 fee passed to Schatten during a joint press conference announcing their cloning breakthrough.

Nor does it explain his failure to credit Hwang’s work when he filed for his own patent on an aspect of the technology in late 2004 after, according to the report, being in almost daily telephone and email contact and meeting almost once a month throughout the year. Schatten’s patent application “presents claims that likely could not be fulfilled by inventions developed at Magee (the foundation that supported his work with Hwang) alone, but might plausibly be supported by technologies reportedly developed by Dr. Hwang’s group between the filings of provisional and actual patents.”

The University of Pittsburgh report did not address the fact that Schatten in two published papers, one in Science and one in Nature, made no mention of his patent filings. Those non-disclosures clearly violated both journals’ conflict of interest policies.

There is growing concern about the negative consequences of excessive entrepreneurialism at the nation’s premier research institutions. Former Harvard University president Derek Bok’s in "Universities in the Marketplace" and Jennifer Washburn in "University, Inc." document the problems caused when profit-maximizing professors fence off the intellectual commons in a mad dash to patent and commercialize basic science insights. Chief among them: it corrodes the collaborative spirit that is far more important than market motives to furthering science.

The emerging stem cell field is clearly threatened by this commercialization fever. Scientists are years, if not decades, away from making stem cell research useful to patients. The subject of the Hwang-Schatten paper, now exposed as fraudulent, involved the basic step of growing cloned embryonic stem cells in bulk, which will be a key building block of this technology when somebody actually gets around to doing it.

But it is just the first step on the long road to a therapy. Scientists must still learn how to differentiate those cells into the different types that might be useful – pancreatic cells, nerve cells, heart cells or brain cells. Then they must figure out how to successfully transplant them. And then they will have to figure out how to make them in a manner that passes muster at the Food and Drug Administration, that is, in a way that is not only safe, but effective.

Schatten’s self-serving scramble for a patent on a building block of further research (his application didn’t even list his employer, the University of Pittsburgh, as an assignee, suggesting this “star” researcher snagged a pretty sweet deal when he was recruited a few years ago) simply adds to the growing patent thicket that is entangling the stem cell field.

Patent thickets, for those not familiar with the lingo, describe situations where there are so many cross-cutting and competing patent claims that it makes it almost impossible for subsequent researchers to negotiate licenses to conduct the next phase of research. In essence, too many patents taken out too soon in an emerging science produce a classic anti-commons effect.

That may not be fraud. But it’s antithetical to good science. And it sure is anti-social.

Posted by gooznews at February 13, 2006 05:34 PM