Research spending integrity matters

Cheating taxpayers and giving false hope to disease sufferers is intolerable behavior. Unfortunately, the federal government doesn't seem to do much to prevent such behavior or punish it when it happens with federal funding for medical research.

That's the situation I discovered after looking into a high-profile medical research fraud case at Iowa State University. A researcher faked results to make it appear an HIV vaccine was working. His fraud helped his team get approval for a reported $19 million in federal grant money.

The federal National Institutes of Health gives out billions of dollars in research grants every year - $24 billion at last accounting. The government has a responsibility to make sure this money is well-spent. Unfortunately, it looks like the government relies on the grant recipients to do oversight instead of doing any of its own.

At Iowa State, no one other than the researcher reportedly was aware of the fraud until another team of scientists couldn't duplicate the results. The university took the problem seriously and notified the federal government. If it weren't for that, the government might never have found out.

A federal office - the Office of Research Integrity - is supposed to prevent and investigate research misconduct. That office investigated the allegations at Iowa State University and confirmed purposeful fraud. The researcher even admitted to the fraud.

Still, the penalty was only that the research was banned from receiving any more federal grant money for three years - a slap on the wrist for blatant fraud.

I asked why the penalty was so light. The Office of Research Integrity officials said federal policy ties their hands, but from my review, they could have done more.

And if their hands really were tied, federal policy needs to change. Someone whose phony results were the basis for federal grants should not be eligible to do it again in three years.

I also pressed the federal government on whether it recovers any taxpayer dollars in research fraud cases. One office kicked the question to another office. Ultimately, the National Institutes of Health puts the onus on grant recipients to police the money. Of course, grant recipients are responsible for making sure the tax dollars they receive are well-spent. But that doesn't absolve the federal government - the grant-maker - of its own responsibility.

At Iowa State, the federal government is taking some action to try to recover or rescind at least some of the fraudulently obtained grant money. Prosecutors have indicted the researcher on fraud charges.

Still, this is a high-profile case. The federal agencies' apathetic attitude toward policing fraud makes you wonder what happens in different circumstances - when a university doesn't come forward about the fraud, when local reporters don't know about the situation, when the researcher doesn't admit the fraud when confronted, or when a U.S. senator isn't asking questions.

With billions of dollars in federal research money disbursed across the country every year, no doubt there are more cases like Iowa State's that never see the light of day. That's unfair to the taxpayers and to the many researchers of high integrity who scrap in high competition for those dollars in the interest of doing public good. It's also unfair to the sufferers of diseases who look to medical research for a cure. They regularly visit me to share their heart-wrenching experiences.

Oversight is an extremely important part of the government's role in any program. Ignore it, and taxpayer dollars inevitably are abused. When researchers abuse the public's trust, the federal agencies in charge need to use all the powers they have to investigate and resolve the problem.

' U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley is a Republican from New Hartford. Contact: 202-224-3744.