Matthew Schrag

I found over many years of experience doing these sorts of articles that people who don't have a great story to tell often are unwilling or unable by their institutions restricting them from saying anything to a reporter.

Ash, I did have a dialogue with, and she very interestingly replied that she wanted to talk with me, but her university advised her not to, and she decided that she would go along with their advice.

I explained to her at the time that I thought it was terrible advice.

because this was her opportunity to get her perspective into the most read, deepest look at the subject.

In this case, what happens is the National Institutes of Health, which is the funder of this work, take a look at it.

They agreed that there was a possible problem there.

They referred it to an obscure government agency called the Office of Research Integrity at the Health and Human Services Department.

This is a tiny little group.

They don't have the

manpower to examine every possible example of fraud or misconduct in the scientific world.

And so what they do is they give it back to the university where the alleged misconduct took place, in this case, the University of Minnesota.

To me, this is exactly the wrong approach because you're entrusting the organization that has the most to lose and the least to gain from a robust, complete, and publicly accessible examination of possible misconduct to do that examination.

So they took years to assess Lesney.

In the meantime, he was still collecting many hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funds to continue the same lines of research that had already been proved questionable.

And, I might add, published a paper after my initial story came out that we found had apparently manipulated scientific images in it.

This goes on and on, and the university is going about their business.

Finally, in 2025...

Lesney retires from his job.

He resigns from his post as a tenured full professor.

This is a pretty young guy.