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The legal fees of a Nobel laureate being investigated for scientific
fraud were among the ‘indirect costs’ (see above story) of research charged
to the American government. In its 1988 account for overheads, MIT’s Whitehead
Institute for Biomedical Research included $114 943 paid to lawyers and
lobbyists who defended David Baltimore, then director of Whitehead (see
This Week, 30 March).

The federal government paid 60 per cent of that sum because it sponsored
60 per cent of research at the institute. Whitehead now calls inclusion
of the legal fees ‘an error’, and on 6 April the institute repaid the government
$68 966.

Baltimore retained legal counsel after John Dingell’s committee began
investigating allegations that a paper in Cell, which he had co-authored,
contained fraudulent data. He also hired lobbyists to contact members of
Congress on his behalf.

Whitehead paid the bills, even though associate director John Pratt
said Baltimore ‘had clearly directed’ that they should not be charged to
the government as overheads.

Pratt said $81 445 were excluded in the financial year ending in 1989,
but that the 1988 charges were included. In a letter to a government auditor
obtained by New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ, Pratt wrote that ‘public relations charges were
properly excluded’, but did not disclose the amount.

The Department of Health and Human Services began auditing Whitehead’s
bills for overheads at the request of the Dingell committee. A spokeswoman
for the Office of the Inspector General said Whitehead returned the money
‘before we went in and looked at the records’.

Last month, the National Institutes of Health concluded that the primary
author of the Cell paper, Thereza Imanishi-Kari, had fabricated much of
the data in it. Baltimore reportedly has hired another lawyer, and drafted
a reply to the NIH. Rockefeller University, where he is now president, announced
that it will pay Baltimore’s legal fees ‘at no cost to the government’.