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The Imaginary Crimes of Margit Hamosh · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. In early summer of nineteen ninety nine, there was
0:23
Speaker 1: a strange incident in Belgium.
0:28
Speaker 2: Products had been taken back from the market when it happened,
0:32
Speaker 2: but obviously it was already a bit too late.
0:36
Speaker 1: It began at a secondary school in a little town
0:39
Speaker 1: called Bornum, just outside Antwerp. A group of students got sick,
0:44
Speaker 1: abdominal distress, headaches, nausea, trembling, dizziness. Dozens of kids in
0:49
Speaker 1: the first wave all ended up in the.
0:52
Speaker 2: Hospital and the only commonality was that they had been
0:55
Speaker 2: eating together, but each had eaten their own sandwiches, so
0:59
Speaker 2: there was no possibility of a food born problem.
1:05
Speaker 1: That's Benoit Memory. He's a medical toxicologist at the University
1:09
Speaker 1: of Lovin. He was part of the group that investigated
1:12
Speaker 1: the outbreak among the students.
1:14
Speaker 2: The only thing that they had in common is that
1:16
Speaker 2: they had drunk coca cola from bottles from a crate
1:21
Speaker 2: and allegedly there was a strange odor in the coke.
1:26
Speaker 2: And then the school teachers went in the different classrooms
1:31
Speaker 2: asking is anybody feeling unwell and drunk coca cola, which
1:38
Speaker 2: of course made sense at the time, but that led
1:42
Speaker 2: a few more children to report sick to be taken
1:46
Speaker 2: to hospital.
1:48
Speaker 1: The story went national. The evening news was a montage
1:51
Speaker 1: of ambulances and worried parents. The next day, four more
1:55
Speaker 1: schools reported outbreaks.
1:57
Speaker 2: I mean, it was really a state of panic.
2:05
Speaker 1: Every single Coca Cola product in Belgium was pulled from
2:08
Speaker 1: the shep and destroyed, thirty million cans and bottles, the
2:12
Speaker 1: largest recall in Coca Cola history. The company was in crisis,
2:17
Speaker 1: the stock price plummeted. I was transfixed by the Belgium
2:21
Speaker 1: coke crisis, not because I had any special interest in
2:24
Speaker 1: Coca Cola or Belgium, but because the whole affair reminded
2:29
Speaker 1: me of another panic, something I'd lived through years before
2:33
Speaker 1: that left me baffled and frustrated. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
2:41
Speaker 1: You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things forgotten
2:45
Speaker 1: and misunderstood. The next two episodes are about a panic
2:51
Speaker 1: that swept the United States a quarter century ago, an
2:54
Speaker 1: outbreak of insanity. I was in the middle of it,
3:00
Speaker 1: covered it as a young reporter for the Washington Post,
3:03
Speaker 1: but it took the Belgian coke crisis a few years
3:06
Speaker 1: later for me to understand why it happened because you
3:10
Speaker 1: know what poisoned all those Belgians. Nothing. The best explanation
3:17
Speaker 1: Coca Cola could come up with was that some of
3:20
Speaker 1: the carbon dioxide at their local bottling plant had been
3:23
Speaker 1: contaminated with sulfur compounds enough to cause a slight odor,
3:28
Speaker 1: but trace amounts orders of magnitude below what is necessary
3:31
Speaker 1: to cause illness.
3:33
Speaker 2: No major toxins detected, nothing that would suggest true poisoning,
3:37
Speaker 2: and so epidemiologically it made no sense that there was
3:42
Speaker 2: poisoning by a single, the same agent.
3:45
Speaker 1: After looking into it, Memory and his colleagues concluded that
3:48
Speaker 1: the crisis was an example of what's known as a
3:51
Speaker 1: mass sociogenic illness, what used to be called mass hysteria.
4:01
Speaker 1: People had real symptoms. They were nauseated and vomiting and dizzy,
4:06
Speaker 1: and the initial batch of coke served at the school
4:08
Speaker 1: in Jornum was a bit off, But the coke didn't
4:12
Speaker 1: poison them. There was no actual connection between their sickness
4:17
Speaker 1: and the thing they thought made them sick. Memory says
4:22
Speaker 1: that he saw another sociogenic outbreak firsthand in Soviet Georgia
4:26
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty nine. Soviet troops had sprayed a group
4:29
Speaker 1: of protesters with chemical agents, a terrible incident. The strange thing, though,
4:34
Speaker 1: was that the children of the protesters had the same
4:37
Speaker 1: symptoms as their parents, even though they weren't the ones
4:41
Speaker 1: who were sprayed. In the medical literature, there are countless
4:45
Speaker 1: cases like this, a group of people linked by some
4:49
Speaker 1: shared anxiety come to believe they had been exposed to
4:52
Speaker 1: something malevolent. And the scary thing is that when you're
4:57
Speaker 1: in the middle of a sociogenic outbreak, when you're vomiting
5:00
Speaker 1: and running a fever after drinking your can of coke,
5:03
Speaker 1: you have no idea, none that the cause of your
5:06
Speaker 1: illness is all in your imagination.
5:11
Speaker 3: So she spoke, I mean her native tongue was German,
5:15
Speaker 3: and then she spoke Hebrew, and she learned English, and
5:18
Speaker 3: she learned French, and she learned Latin.
5:21
Speaker 4: This is mom.
5:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe she knew Aramic very well.
5:27
Speaker 5: Yes, she spoke with a private teacher rush in a
5:31
Speaker 5: high school conversational Latin.
5:34
Speaker 4: They's spoke Latin with each other.
5:37
Speaker 1: I'm at the house of Ada Hamish, just outside of Baltimore,
5:41
Speaker 1: on her porch. She's a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins.
5:45
Speaker 1: Next to her is her sister, Tamar, professor of medicine
5:49
Speaker 1: at Yale University, and next to Tamorrow their father, Paul,
5:53
Speaker 1: retired professor of medicine at Georgetown University. Atta and Tamar
5:58
Speaker 1: are talking about their mother, Marguite, also a professor of
6:02
Speaker 1: medicine at Georgetown University until she died of cancer in
6:05
Speaker 1: twenty eleven.
6:07
Speaker 4: And then when Jack.
6:08
Speaker 3: Cancer, she's like, oh, yeah, it's a little inconvenient, but
6:10
Speaker 3: it's gonna be fine, just the way she did her
6:12
Speaker 3: whole life, and she was very, very positive. She had
6:15
Speaker 3: this amazing ability to make whoever she was talking to
6:19
Speaker 3: think that they were the single most important person in
6:21
Speaker 3: the room with the most interesting story.
6:23
Speaker 1: Margite Hamish was born in Germany, then raised in Bucharest
6:27
Speaker 1: after her family fled the Nazis in nineteen thirty six.
6:30
Speaker 1: She met her husband Paul in Israel after the war.
6:34
Speaker 1: She was the star. He was the protector, He was
6:37
Speaker 1: the cook.
6:38
Speaker 3: He was the come out of school and make sure
6:40
Speaker 3: you don't have vaningitis when you can't move your neck.
6:43
Speaker 3: He came to the place, he came to the games.
6:45
Speaker 4: He cheered us on. He took a backseat to her.
6:49
Speaker 4: He always did.
6:51
Speaker 1: For sixty years. They were a team.
6:53
Speaker 4: They would have breakfast and bed together.
6:55
Speaker 3: They would drive to work together, they would work in
6:56
Speaker 3: the same office, they would drive home together, they would
6:58
Speaker 3: make dinner together, they would go and do whatever they
7:01
Speaker 3: were doing for the evening.
7:01
Speaker 4: Together, and they would go in the same bed. And
7:03
Speaker 4: my mother would say, I just don't see enough of
7:05
Speaker 4: your father all the time.
7:09
Speaker 6: I just don't see enough. Which, yeah, and that's what
7:14
Speaker 6: you would say, like, I don't know where it is.
7:16
Speaker 6: I'm like, I think you went to the bathroom, mom, No,
7:18
Speaker 6: I mean they were crazy.
7:19
Speaker 4: I mean yeah, even when they were in their sixties.
7:22
Speaker 3: You know, they always read the paper on a Sunday morning,
7:25
Speaker 3: and we had a big yeah, And so they would
7:30
Speaker 3: read the paper and they would chase each other around
7:33
Speaker 3: like I mean, like kids in love. I mean like
7:36
Speaker 3: I'm like, okay, guys, like you're sixty five, we've had enough,
7:39
Speaker 3: come on all right.
7:39
Speaker 4: Yeah, It's it was bizarre. It was very bizarre.
7:45
Speaker 1: Marguite Hamish discovered an enzyme critical for newborn digestion, became
7:50
Speaker 1: an expert on human milk and nutrition, lectured all over
7:53
Speaker 1: the world, ran a major laboratory at Georgetown funded by
7:57
Speaker 1: millions in research grants from the National Institutes of Health.
8:01
Speaker 1: An intellectual, elegant and cultured.
8:05
Speaker 4: Even when she.
8:06
Speaker 3: Had three children and a full time job and everything else,
8:08
Speaker 3: they went out at least three times a week to
8:11
Speaker 3: a play or a concert or performance every week.
8:14
Speaker 4: One weekend day was in museum. The other weekend day
8:16
Speaker 4: was cooking for the week.
8:18
Speaker 3: On Saturday afternoon, the offer was on and if you
8:21
Speaker 3: made a sound, you were dead, So you took a nap.
8:23
Speaker 4: From two to five Live from Lincoln suck Hit.
8:31
Speaker 1: In the late nineteen eighties, Marguerite Homash had a small
8:34
Speaker 1: problem in her lab, nothing major. A disagreement with one
8:38
Speaker 1: of her researchers. The researcher quit, Then she changed her
8:42
Speaker 1: mind wanted her job back. The Homishes rehired her. The
8:47
Speaker 1: second time around, the researcher grew even more disgruntled. She
8:50
Speaker 1: ended up making a series of accusations. Georgetown launched an investigation.
8:55
Speaker 1: Hamish was cleared, but the researcher then appealed her case
8:59
Speaker 1: to the National Institutes of Health, the institution that funded
9:02
Speaker 1: Hamish's research. Because the NAH gives out billions of dollars
9:06
Speaker 1: in research grants, they have a mechanism to ensure their
9:09
Speaker 1: money is used appropriately. In those days, it was an
9:13
Speaker 1: investigative unit called the OSI, the Office of Scientific Integrity.
9:18
Speaker 1: When universities could not resolve disputes on their own, the
9:22
Speaker 1: OSI would step in and take the case. That's what
9:25
Speaker 1: happened with Humish. The OSI investigated and wrote a report.
9:30
Speaker 3: Several people asked me what is this all about? And
9:33
Speaker 3: the truth is that I really didn't know what it
9:36
Speaker 3: was all about, in the sense that you know, there
9:39
Speaker 3: was a lot of ranting and rating going on.
9:44
Speaker 1: Now, let me ask you this, when was the last
9:46
Speaker 1: time you heard about an internal laboratory dispute between medical
9:51
Speaker 1: researchers working in some esoteric corner of human physiology. Unless
9:56
Speaker 1: you're a scientist, I'm going to guess never. People in
10:00
Speaker 1: academic laboratories work long hours in close quarters. The pay
10:05
Speaker 1: is low. You can spend years on an experiment with
10:08
Speaker 1: little to show for. You might see the person next
10:11
Speaker 1: to you get a job, or publish a paper, or
10:13
Speaker 1: win an award that you think you deserved. Competition for
10:17
Speaker 1: funding is intense. Labs are stressful places, so what That's
10:22
Speaker 1: why scientists publish their results to work out disagreements among themselves.
10:27
Speaker 1: Fights rarely go public except during a brief period in
10:33
Speaker 1: the early nineteen nineties, the window of insanity, when everything
10:39
Speaker 1: went public. Back then, I was on a team of
10:44
Speaker 1: science writers at the Washington Post. We call ourselves the Pod.
10:48
Speaker 1: We wrote about medicine and physics and psychology and covered
10:51
Speaker 1: the health bureaucracy, the NIH, the Food and Drug Administration,
10:55
Speaker 1: the CDC and what were we obsessed with? Not just
10:58
Speaker 1: us but our counterparts at other newspapers as well. Science fraud.
11:05
Speaker 1: There was the Baltimore case, an insanely complicated allegation against
11:10
Speaker 1: the Nobel Prize winner David Baltimore. The Gallow Case, an
11:14
Speaker 1: unbelievable tale of the AIDS virus and a lab theft.
11:18
Speaker 1: The Cleveland Clinic case It never ended, leaks, lawsuits, page
11:23
Speaker 1: one stories, big headlines. A science writer at the Chicago Tribune,
11:27
Speaker 1: a reporter named John Krudsen, wrote eighty thousand words on
11:32
Speaker 1: the Gallow case. Eighty thousand words for a newspaper. I
11:36
Speaker 1: have written books that aren't eighty thousand words. There was
11:40
Speaker 1: a nine hour Congressional hearing entirely devoted to a scientific
11:43
Speaker 1: paper entitled Altered Repertoire of Indogenous Immunoglobular Gene expression in
11:48
Speaker 1: transgenic mice containing a rearranged MEW heavy chain gene. Nine
11:54
Speaker 1: hours during which congressmen attempted to sound intelligent on the
11:58
Speaker 1: subject of transgenic MEW products. Then in the middle of
12:04
Speaker 1: all of this, Marguite Hamish. I never met her, but
12:08
Speaker 1: for some reason, out of all the cases that bubbled
12:11
Speaker 1: up in the great science Panic, hers was always the
12:15
Speaker 1: case that affected me the deepest. It made me angry
12:19
Speaker 1: in ways that will take the better part of this
12:21
Speaker 1: episode and the next to explain. Why did Marguerite Hamish
12:26
Speaker 1: choose to spend her life in a laboratory out of
12:29
Speaker 1: all the things she could have done. It's not hard
12:32
Speaker 1: to imagine she was a refugee from Nazi Germany.
12:36
Speaker 3: There were times when I remember vividly I interrupted my
12:40
Speaker 3: mother because I don't know, I was in sixth grade
12:42
Speaker 3: and a boy dumped me or something. I said, Nikki
12:45
Speaker 3: dumped me, And she looked at me and she said,
12:47
Speaker 3: you know, at your age, I was, you know, in
12:50
Speaker 3: an air age shelter, you know, wondering what I was.
12:53
Speaker 5: Going to eat.
12:55
Speaker 1: A laboratory offered order and certainty and safety. After all,
12:59
Speaker 1: she'd been through what happens outside the laboratory doesn't matter,
13:05
Speaker 1: and then out of the blue, the outside world does matter.
13:10
Speaker 1: A routine disagreement with someone in her lab turned into
13:14
Speaker 1: a national story. Marguerite Hamish has been forced to defend
13:18
Speaker 1: herself against charges of falsifying data, plagiarism, and mismanaging research
13:23
Speaker 1: in her laboratory. Washington Post, January twenty second, nineteen ninety one,
13:28
Speaker 1: written by one of my colleagues. I'm not going to
13:31
Speaker 1: say who, because I think that any of us back
13:33
Speaker 1: then could have written it. It was what we did.
13:39
Speaker 3: I remember vividly when the paper came out and one
13:41
Speaker 3: of my friends said, have you seen this paper? Have
13:44
Speaker 3: you seen this article? And I said what article? And
13:47
Speaker 3: they're like, did your mom commit scientific frod. I'm like, no,
13:50
Speaker 3: what are you talking about? And I read it and
13:52
Speaker 3: I was like, gosh.
13:53
Speaker 4: This is bad.
13:55
Speaker 1: It was bad. The Homishes didn't want to talk at first.
14:00
Speaker 1: They told me they didn't want to dig up all
14:02
Speaker 1: those memories.
14:04
Speaker 5: I was ready to get her. Fifty seven years it's
14:08
Speaker 5: a long time, and I was. I was her protector.
14:13
Speaker 3: They had was beyond my relationship, and he couldn't protect
14:18
Speaker 3: it from us.
14:18
Speaker 4: It was really bad, and that.
14:19
Speaker 5: I couldn't protect her in this particular.
14:22
Speaker 1: Case, Paul Hamish could not protect my geete anymore. She
14:28
Speaker 1: had been swept up in a panic.
14:53
Speaker 7: Would you knowingly allow yourself to be treated by a
14:56
Speaker 7: doctor with AIDS. It's been just over a year since
14:59
Speaker 7: Denis David Acer died of age in Florida, and he
15:03
Speaker 7: left five of his former patients with the disease of AIDS.
15:07
Speaker 1: The Oprah Winfrey Show, September nineteen ninety one. Oprah's guest
15:11
Speaker 1: is twenty three year old Kimberly Bergalis, one of five
15:15
Speaker 1: patients infected by doctor Acer.
15:17
Speaker 7: Has there been any clarification, Kimberly on how you contracted
15:22
Speaker 7: the disease? Was there a cut or was the doctor cut?
15:27
Speaker 7: Or was it transmitted through the instrument? Or what? Have
15:30
Speaker 7: you been clarified on.
15:31
Speaker 2: That as yet?
15:32
Speaker 8: No, we haven't.
15:34
Speaker 7: You don't, And I suppose at this point it doesn't
15:37
Speaker 7: really matter that much.
15:39
Speaker 2: It mattered.
15:41
Speaker 1: The AIDS epidemic was then at its height, there was
15:44
Speaker 1: no effective treatment. The epidemic had started with the gay
15:47
Speaker 1: community and IVY drug users and people who had received
15:50
Speaker 1: contaminated blood transfusions. But Kimberly Bergalis wasn't gay, or a
15:55
Speaker 1: drug user, or someone who had gone through a major
15:58
Speaker 1: medical procedure. She was just a college student in Florida,
16:02
Speaker 1: a virgin from a religious family, who had done nothing
16:05
Speaker 1: more than go see the dentist. If you would have
16:08
Speaker 1: chart public fear of a HIV over time, That summer
16:11
Speaker 1: of nineteen ninety one, during Kimberly Bergalis's slow and very
16:15
Speaker 1: public death, was the peak. Bergalis's parents took her on
16:20
Speaker 1: a train from their home in Florida to Washington, d C.
16:23
Speaker 1: To testify before Congress. They wanted mandatory HIV testing for
16:27
Speaker 1: all health care providers. An army of reporters from around
16:31
Speaker 1: the country climbed on board to document her journey. I
16:35
Speaker 1: was one of them. Kimberly Bergalis's Ride of Rage September
16:40
Speaker 1: twenty sixth, nineteen ninety one, Washington Post. She was down
16:45
Speaker 1: to seventy pounds by that point. When she spoke to reporters,
16:48
Speaker 1: her father would carry her in his arms. There was
16:51
Speaker 1: a sixty minutes episode about her. A long running controversy
16:55
Speaker 1: over whether her dentist deliberately infected her. Interviews Headlines and
17:00
Speaker 1: then Oprah twice.
17:02
Speaker 7: Now in a recent letter to Florida Health officials. Kimberly
17:06
Speaker 7: Bergalis makes it clear who she thinks is responsible for
17:10
Speaker 7: her having this disease. In an excerpt, Kimberly states, who
17:13
Speaker 7: do I blame? Do I blame myself? I sure don't.
17:16
Speaker 7: I never had a blood transfusion. I blamed doctor Acer
17:20
Speaker 7: and every single one of you, bastard. She says, I'm dying, guys, goodbye. Really,
17:26
Speaker 7: we all just are interested in knowing, first of all,
17:29
Speaker 7: how you are feeling, and how are you doing.
17:35
Speaker 2: Well.
17:36
Speaker 3: I'm walking with assistance right now, mm hmm.
17:41
Speaker 5: And I'm eating a lot mm hm.
17:45
Speaker 8: I'm still pretty weak h.
17:48
Speaker 3: But I feel better.
17:52
Speaker 1: A few months later, she was gone. The great anxiety
17:58
Speaker 1: of the early Aides epidemic was that science and the
18:01
Speaker 1: medical establishment had failed us, they hadn't protected us, and
18:06
Speaker 1: the regardless case embodied that fear.
18:09
Speaker 8: I had a lot of abuse from your medical establishment.
18:12
Speaker 8: I think that's one of the most frustrating things.
18:15
Speaker 1: When Kimberly appeared on OPRAH the final time, her mother
18:18
Speaker 1: Anna was by her side, you.
18:20
Speaker 8: Know, my daughter dying. They realized that she is dying.
18:24
Speaker 8: They realized that she is dying because of the medical establishment,
18:29
Speaker 8: the civil liberties, the gay activist groups and they're not
18:34
Speaker 8: doing anything. You know, I'm not emotional, I'm not hysterical.
18:37
Speaker 8: I am enraged.
18:41
Speaker 1: Ten years into the AIDS epidemic, people had found their
18:44
Speaker 1: culprit the medical establishment. Now, of course, just a few
18:48
Speaker 1: years later, the same medical establishment that everyone was blaming
18:52
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety one would figure out how to treat
18:54
Speaker 1: HIV and the thing that was so scary, infection by
18:58
Speaker 1: a healthcare provider would turn out to be a one off,
19:01
Speaker 1: incredibly rare. But no one knew that. In a summer
19:05
Speaker 1: of nineteen ninety one. All we had was fear and anger.
19:09
Speaker 1: And once you start seeing something dark in the motives
19:12
Speaker 1: of people in white coats, it doesn't end. Every disagreement,
19:17
Speaker 1: every anomaly, every mole hill becomes a scandal.
19:22
Speaker 5: We'll call me designed.
19:24
Speaker 7: A hoofe building is through the DeFi behen hindi oxino.
19:30
Speaker 1: That's exactly what happened with the Belgian Cochysed area. A
19:34
Speaker 1: few months earlier, Belgium had been through a crisis. Chickens
19:38
Speaker 1: and farms across the country had fallen ill their feet
19:42
Speaker 1: had gotten contaminated with dioxin, one of the most toxic
19:45
Speaker 1: of all chemicals.
19:46
Speaker 2: No, it was major. It was it was It's probably
19:49
Speaker 2: one of the biggest food scares in I would say
19:52
Speaker 2: maybe in history.
19:53
Speaker 1: Benoit Memory, the toxicologist, was in the middle of it.
19:57
Speaker 1: The Belgian government had to recall anything that might possibly
20:00
Speaker 1: have been in contact with the contaminated feed, eggs, chicken beef.
20:06
Speaker 1: The news was filled with talk about how extraordinarily danger
20:09
Speaker 1: just dioxins are, how even trace amounts can cause cancer.
20:13
Speaker 2: Every day on television you you could see animals that
20:17
Speaker 2: were being slaughtered and dumped into mass graves.
20:21
Speaker 7: And of a hane specific acid second ant.
20:24
Speaker 3: And so.
20:29
Speaker 1: Then a few weeks later, a batch of coke smells
20:32
Speaker 1: a little funny and the panic starts, a panic born
20:36
Speaker 1: entirely in the imagination of terrified children and their parents
20:40
Speaker 1: and teachers.
20:41
Speaker 2: School children being poisoned by coca cola, which is again
20:47
Speaker 2: one of the biggest symbols of our modern food. And
20:51
Speaker 2: so that was really the sort of sherry on on
20:54
Speaker 2: that rotten cake.
20:56
Speaker 1: Epidemics of fear repeat themselves. You start with dioxin, you
21:02
Speaker 1: end up with coca cola, You start with kimberly bergalis,
21:06
Speaker 1: you end up with margite Hamish. First time is tragedy.
21:10
Speaker 1: The second time is farce. On March twenty second, nineteen
21:14
Speaker 1: ninety one, the Washington Post published its second article on
21:19
Speaker 1: the Homish case. It began the way all the science
21:22
Speaker 1: fraud stories of that era began, with a call to authority. Quote.
21:27
Speaker 1: The National Institutes of Health has concluded that a top
21:31
Speaker 1: scientist at Georgetown University Medical Center committed scientific misconduct by
21:38
Speaker 1: knowingly submitting false information in applying for two federal research
21:42
Speaker 1: grants end quote. This is now two months after the
21:47
Speaker 1: first big piece on the Homish case in the Washington Post.
21:50
Speaker 1: The Office of Scientific Integrity has finished its investigation and
21:55
Speaker 1: found her guilty. Maybe because this was a story written
22:01
Speaker 1: by someone else, and maybe because I could see it
22:04
Speaker 1: with fresh eyes, But I remember reading the piece and
22:08
Speaker 1: reading it again and wondering, what is this. Something's wrong.
22:14
Speaker 1: This was the point I became a skeptic first thing.
22:20
Speaker 1: So it sounds like there was some kind of formal
22:22
Speaker 1: hearing which ruled against Marguerite Hamish. Right. Actually, No, here's
22:28
Speaker 1: the way things worked at the Office of Scientific Integrity.
22:31
Speaker 1: They would interview both parties to a disagreement, write up
22:35
Speaker 1: their findings, and then just lead them to the press.
22:38
Speaker 1: Someone in the office would slip his or her favorite
22:41
Speaker 1: reporter a package of documents stamped something like confidential or
22:46
Speaker 1: for internal use only, or simply draft, put inside plain
22:50
Speaker 1: brown envelopes. I got them. We all got them. Now,
22:55
Speaker 1: if you scroll down to the second to last paragraph
22:58
Speaker 1: in the Washington Post piece, you'll come to this Hamish,
23:02
Speaker 1: who is chief of the Division of Developmental Biology and
23:05
Speaker 1: Nutrition in Georgetown's Pediatrics department, have an opportunity to review
23:10
Speaker 1: the report and submit a written rebuttal. End quote, will
23:16
Speaker 1: have an opportunity she hadn't seen it, and also submit
23:20
Speaker 1: a written rebuttal. The OSI had concluded Marguite Hamish was
23:24
Speaker 1: a fraud without showing her the evidence or letting her respond.
23:31
Speaker 1: I remember once, not long before this, doing another story
23:34
Speaker 1: on a science fraud case. I called the attorney for
23:37
Speaker 1: the accused, and he said, well, I can't comment because
23:40
Speaker 1: I have no idea what my client is accused of.
23:43
Speaker 1: I took my leaked OSI report out of its plain
23:46
Speaker 1: brown wrapper, photocopied it, and sent it over to him.
23:51
Speaker 1: No part of that transaction had seemed weird to me
23:55
Speaker 1: at the time. Now, the most important question of all,
24:00
Speaker 1: what was it that Marguite Hamish did what was her
24:04
Speaker 1: alleged fraud. I have been going on and on about
24:07
Speaker 1: this case for a good half power now, and I
24:10
Speaker 1: haven't told you you know why, because we didn't know.
24:14
Speaker 1: You won't find a good explanation in the Washington Post
24:16
Speaker 1: story of March twenty second, nineteen ninety one, just vague
24:20
Speaker 1: mentions of an experiment involving rabbits. Well, let me tell
24:24
Speaker 1: you the final accusation against marguite Hamish. At the end
24:28
Speaker 1: of a twenty thousand word NIH grant application, in a
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Speaker 1: section that was completely peripheral to the subject of her
24:36
Speaker 1: grant request, Marguite Hamish wrote the following sentence, last, but
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Speaker 1: not least, we are presently using the newborn rabbit as
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Speaker 1: an animal model for total parential nutrition. After scrutinizing every
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Speaker 1: word of her grand application, the OSI said that's wrong
24:58
Speaker 1: because at the time Marguite Hamish wrote the grant, she
25:01
Speaker 1: didn't actually have the animal model up and running. She
25:04
Speaker 1: wasn't presently using newborn rabbits. Their understanding of the the
25:09
Speaker 1: word presently was it stands as a synonym for currently.
25:15
Speaker 1: Hamish's defense was she had designed the rabbit experiments. She
25:20
Speaker 1: had received the money to conduct those experiments, she had
25:23
Speaker 1: obtained the special surgical equipment to run the rabbit experiments,
25:27
Speaker 1: and she had begun collecting the necessary preliminary data on
25:31
Speaker 1: the rabbits prior to the experiment. She was going to
25:34
Speaker 1: do the rabbit experiments presently. She was using presently as
25:40
Speaker 1: a synonym for shortly, which is the way that it
25:43
Speaker 1: is often used in British English. The doctor will be
25:46
Speaker 1: with you presently. That's it. Her crime was not writing
25:54
Speaker 1: the more conventional we will shortly be using the newborn
25:58
Speaker 1: rabbit as an animal model, or maybe shifting the word
26:03
Speaker 1: presently to the end of the sentence, which is the
26:05
Speaker 1: one place where in American English we will accept the
26:08
Speaker 1: British definition of presently, we will be using the newborn
26:12
Speaker 1: rabbit as an animal model for total parential nutrition. Presently.
26:16
Speaker 1: But I don't know. She was born in Germany, she
26:19
Speaker 1: was educated in Israel. English is her seventh language. Okay,
26:26
Speaker 1: now you might say this is ridiculous. Still, ridiculous cases
26:30
Speaker 1: sometimes happen, so what. But after Hamish it dawned on
26:35
Speaker 1: me that they were all like this, all the science
26:38
Speaker 1: fraud cases that we had become obsessed with like the
26:41
Speaker 1: case of Meko Popovic, a virologist at the NIH, the
26:45
Speaker 1: scientists who figured out how to grow the AIDS virus
26:48
Speaker 1: in the laboratory, without which nothing, no subsequent research on
26:53
Speaker 1: HIV would have been possible. Here he is as a
26:57
Speaker 1: bit character in the film adaptation of and the band.
27:00
Speaker 5: Played on Yes, Yes, Who's Calling.
27:05
Speaker 1: At a time when people knew nothing about HIV except
27:08
Speaker 1: that it was the most as virus anyone had ever seen,
27:11
Speaker 1: Papovic slaved away in the laboratory hours on end, working
27:14
Speaker 1: with samples of HIV infected blood with his hands.
27:19
Speaker 4: Anything.
27:21
Speaker 5: How can I how can I isolate the virus?
27:24
Speaker 4: If I just can't keep the settles alive.
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Speaker 1: Popovic was also accused of fraud. Why because in a
27:33
Speaker 1: chart in the paper where he first described growing the
27:36
Speaker 1: AIDS virus, Papovic eight times used the initials n D
27:41
Speaker 1: in the place of a number. The charts legend said
27:44
Speaker 1: ND meant not done. The OSI said, wait, you did
27:49
Speaker 1: do those experiments. That's fraud, except Popovic's english is bad.
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Speaker 1: Somebody helped him write the paper, and that person put
27:59
Speaker 1: in the footnote about ND meaning not done. What Popovic
28:03
Speaker 1: actually meant by ND was not determinable, meaning the results
28:07
Speaker 1: were inconclusive. So why did Popovic miss the error in
28:11
Speaker 1: the not done footnote. Maybe because the article in question
28:15
Speaker 1: was published in nineteen eighty four, when AIDS was in
28:19
Speaker 1: its first terrifying stages, and maybe he was in just
28:23
Speaker 1: a little bit of a hurry to publish the most
28:25
Speaker 1: important advance to that point against the epidemic. The battle
28:33
Speaker 1: over n D went on for years. The OSI conducted
28:38
Speaker 1: more than seven thousand hours of interviews and deliberations. Papovic
28:43
Speaker 1: sued lost ran through his savings, got chased out of
28:47
Speaker 1: Nih over a dispute over the correct interpretation of two
28:51
Speaker 1: initials n D. Presently it was like the Spanish Inquisition,
28:57
Speaker 1: staffed by a mob of angry copy editors in the
29:04
Speaker 1: face of a panic. It is the job of those
29:06
Speaker 1: who know better to stand and say, like Benoit Memory did, wait,
29:11
Speaker 1: it isn't the coke. The coke is harmless. This is
29:15
Speaker 1: misplaced anxiety. It is the job of those who know
29:19
Speaker 1: better to deliver the difficult truth. But those of us
29:23
Speaker 1: who were science writers in that era didn't do that.
29:27
Speaker 1: We lapped up the leaks from the OSI. We wrote
29:30
Speaker 1: our sensational stories, and we tore apart the lives of
29:35
Speaker 1: innocent people. No one remembers Marguite Homish today. She's a
29:41
Speaker 1: footnote one scientist lang Gone who worked away quietly in
29:45
Speaker 1: a lab on a problem that most of us have
29:47
Speaker 1: never heard of.
29:49
Speaker 3: First of all, the amount of material that this case
29:52
Speaker 3: generated was no less than three hundred pounds of paper. Okay,
29:56
Speaker 3: I mean, I would say, in their house, right in
29:59
Speaker 3: their house. So and you didn't see the part that
30:01
Speaker 3: was downstairs that you told me it was an entire
30:03
Speaker 3: foucon entire firec And then up in the cellar there
30:05
Speaker 3: were boxes and boxes full of binders.
30:09
Speaker 1: Eat Hamish shouldn't be a footnote. Her case should be
30:12
Speaker 1: a warning. This is what happens when we let our
30:16
Speaker 1: fears consume us.
30:18
Speaker 3: But I opened a binder, and I mean her annotations
30:21
Speaker 3: were she annotated every every binder had her handwriting in it.
30:26
Speaker 4: This isn't true. I didn't say that, you know. I
30:29
Speaker 4: think this is misinterpreted.
30:30
Speaker 3: Tiny mom handwriting everywhere, yellow pages, legal pages, stuck in
30:35
Speaker 3: I disagree with this.
30:37
Speaker 4: This isn't right. Every binder she annotated.
30:39
Speaker 3: Every mom Mom annotated every binder of everything with this case.
30:44
Speaker 4: So think about what she could have been doing at
30:46
Speaker 4: that time.
30:51
Speaker 1: Then one day it stopped. How that happened is the
30:55
Speaker 1: subject of the next episode. How all the cases that
30:58
Speaker 1: obsessed us just went away and the fever passed.
31:04
Speaker 4: It aged her.
31:05
Speaker 3: I think a lot. I mean when I think of
31:06
Speaker 3: my mother and how she aged, she was a woman
31:10
Speaker 3: who likes true. In her late forties early fifties was
31:14
Speaker 3: still very beautiful, but by the time she had sixties,
31:17
Speaker 3: she looked every bit of sixty, and that decade was
31:20
Speaker 3: probably hard for her.
31:21
Speaker 5: She was always g four with me, and I didn't
31:25
Speaker 5: know that she's suffering, and to what extent she's suffering
31:31
Speaker 5: for this whole saying, I don't think.
31:32
Speaker 3: Well, I tell you I talked to Mom a lot
31:35
Speaker 3: about it, and what she said was, I pretend it's
31:39
Speaker 3: not happening until unless I have to speak with the lawyer,
31:42
Speaker 3: and then I get a migraine, and then the next time. Five.
31:47
Speaker 1: One last question, And because I don't want to keep
31:50
Speaker 1: you guys from ever did anyone from ANAH ever apologize?
31:57
Speaker 5: No? No, about who?
31:59
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, I don't think anyone ever apologized.
32:04
Speaker 1: The insanity passes, then everyone pretends it ever happened, except
32:11
Speaker 1: for those who don't have the luxury of pretending I
32:16
Speaker 1: was angry about it. Then I'm angry about it still.
32:29
Speaker 1: Revisionist History is a panoply production. The lead producer is
32:33
Speaker 1: Mei LaBelle with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista. Our editor
32:37
Speaker 1: is Julia Barton. Flonon Williams is our engineer. Fact checking
32:41
Speaker 1: by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Giera. Special thanks
32:45
Speaker 1: to Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gadwell.
32:56
Speaker 5: Even when she was dying, I took having wheelchair to
33:00
Speaker 5: the Kennedy Center is as much as I called.
33:03
Speaker 4: She needed to see art.