Research MD at Harvard working on homocysteine as a contributing factor to heart disease. When he runs into trouble getting more grants (NIH, etc), they tell him no grants, get lost. He loses his job. But this was not enough for Harvard, which bases its hiring decisions on ability to draw grants, not on worth of study subject.

The researcher then has trouble getting another job anywhere. Someone at Harvard is badmouthing him, presumably when contacted for a reference as his previous employer. After 50 job applications and no luck, the researcher contacts a lawyer, who makes some phone calls and the persecution stops.

Failing to bring in big bucks to academic institutions is apparently a felony. Anyone who researches something new and different without having the protection of tenure is skating on thin ice.

Also interesting that the big argument about continuing the Framingham study for so long was partly a difference of opinion on whether it was necessary to know the cause of a disease before doing any treatment. The lab researchers said it was. The clinical people said that treating hypertension reduced deaths, had been proved in clinical trials, and should be done while the lab people continued their (still unsuccessful) search for the cause.

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Originally posted by lou:

Research MD at Harvard working on homocysteine as a contributing factor to heart disease. When he runs into trouble getting more grants (NIH, etc), they tell him no grants, get lost. He loses his job. But this was not enough for Harvard, which bases its hiring decisions on ability to draw grants, not on worth of study subject.

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You are talking about Kilmer S. McCully. Ironically back in the late 90's the NYT Sunday magazine had an excellent article about this situation. (No doubt in ten years or so the NYT will be doing articles about how horrible the Lyme situation is, while leaving out the way they helped make things worse.)

Anyway, according to the Times, one of the primary reasons that the establishment was so hostile to McCully was that he was suggesting
homocysteine was a major risk factor for heart disease at a time when the big news was cholesterol. Even worse, he theorized that (cheap) B vitamins might help prevent heart disease at a time Harvard, and everybody else in medical research, was trying to manufacture and patent cholesterol meds.

If I recall correctly, McCully was a pathologist who was doing autopsies on children who had died of a rare medical condition that left them with abnormally high levels of homocysteine. He noticed that the cardiovascular systems of these children looked like those of 60 or 70 year old cardiac patients. Then he started measuring homocysteine levels in adult cardiac patients. Well, you can guess what he found. But of course none of his colleagues were interested in findings that suggested there were other risk factors for heart disease besides cholesterol.

Gotta love the medical establishment's priorities, not to mention its devotion to truth.

Did anyone read the long article in Atlantic Monthly several years ago titled "The Kept University?" One of the authors has now written a book on this subject. If you like horror movies, this will be your cup of tea. Actually, it isn't just the influence of corporations on universities, because now the universities are in business too, and just as ruthless and greedy as those in the world of commerce.

Here is the Atlantic article:
http://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=article&DocID=134

And here is her new book on this subject:
http://tinyurl.com/88ra5

(Not suggesting you buy it; I got a copy from local library.)