Charles Piller

We'll be right back.

You said you were directed to a lab where you were an undergraduate at University of North Dakota.

And there was someone, I guess, running the lab, right?

Othman Grebe, who became really a mentor of yours, correct?

Yeah, absolutely.

He taught me an awful lot and became a very good friend.

Turns out that he was one of the people that you blew the whistle on the hardest, yes?

Yeah, I mean, it was a very disappointing end to our relationship.

This, again, is Matthew Schrag.

He told us earlier about this research with Greeby looking at plaque buildup in the brains of rabbits who'd been fed a high cholesterol diet.

I asked Schrag what his role had been in this research.

So who was it that, in your view, took and manipulated those images before they were published in the paper?

And how much of it had problems?

Meaning manipulated imagery and so on?

So when you called him, ultimately, what was that call like?

I understand that there'd been an earlier misconduct inquiry into his work back in 2006 or 2007.

Do you know anything about that?

I do now.

Okay, so you were a kid when you worked with him, and now you're an actual academic.

The 2006 Rabbit paper by Grebe, Schrag and three other co-authors was retracted in 2023.