Nobel Prize Winner’s ‘Pedophile Operation’; Probe of EHR Giant; NIH K Award Changes

The New Yorker examined the sexual abuse of a famed NIH researcher who for decades brought dozens of young boys back to the U.S. from the Pacific islands. D. Carleton Gajdusek, MD, won the Nobel Prize in 1976 for his work on kuru, a rare and fatal neurodegenerative prion disease in Papua New Guinea, and kept journals at the NIH that detailed his sexual interactions with children. Colleagues mostly looked the other way, according to the report. “I realized I’m in the middle of a pedophile operation that has been run out of the NIH by a Nobel laureate for 30 years,” said Mark Godec, MD, a fellow at Gajdusek’s lab at the time. Godec brought the concerns to a senator, and in 1997 Gajdusek pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual abuse following an FBI investigation. The NIH didn’t fire him, instead allowing him to resign. The Nobel Prize winner served a year in jail, where he continued to publish papers.

The Federal Trade Commission launched an antitrust investigation into Epic, the country’s largest electronic health record (EHR) vendor. According to sources, the agency has requested information from others in the industry on how Epic allows or withholds access to its data. The move follows a December lawsuit from Texas that accused the EHR giant of using fees and other tactics to avoid sharing data with rivals. (Reuters via AOL)

FDA investigators finally visited a Taylor Farms processing facility in Mexico, a month after the company’s iceberg lettuce was linked to a massive multistate cyclosporiasis outbreak. Cyclospora, the microscopic parasite that causes the bouts of watery and explosive diarrhea, is notoriously difficult to trace back to a source, but experts say the agency should have been on the ground sooner. “Every day and every hour matters,” said Frank Yiannas, MPH, a former deputy commissioner for food policy and response at the FDA. (Washington Post)

A new Doritos ad campaign — corn seedlings and fields, farmers, tractors — shows how the Make America Healthy Again movement is spurring change among ultraprocessed food makers. But rather than fundamental changes to their products, Big Food is mostly just taking the faster and cheaper route of adjusting its marketing messages. It’s “not literally false, but rather highly selective,” according to David Ortega, PhD, a professor of food economics and policy at Michigan State University. “Claims like ‘natural,’ ‘plant-based,’ and ‘made with real’ describe an input without saying anything about the final product’s degree of processing.” (STAT)

NIH recently announced it will eliminate clinical trial funding for K awards, grants specifically designated for early-career scientists. Some applauded the change, saying it will eliminate “small, crappy” trials, but other agency observers said the change could hurt early clinical researchers and disproportionately affect marginalized groups and research on HIV, women, and behavioral issues — common subjects for past awards. (Science)

In other agency news, NIH plans to change how it scores grants. Rather than sharing a numerical rating from external peer-reviewers, that score would be kept secret and replaced by a “binning” system where proposals would be grouped into top, middle, and bottom tiers as a quality indicator for applicants and staff. Critics say the move could deprive researchers of valuable feedback and mask political interference in grant decisions. (Science)