From Scott Smythe, August 10 Your list of “Fortunate Ones” who never pay for their misdeeds should include Dr. Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health. If you Google Collins, you’ll see that a few secular types take him to task for being an Evangelical Christian. He has written a best-seller supposedly reconciling God and Science and he gives speeches on the subject. But you have to dig very deep to find any reference to the scandal that Frankie boy skipped away from in the 1990s, when he had to retract FIVE published papers he had co-authored! The fraudulent studies were conducted in HIS lab at the University of Michigan. That’s how scientists talk —”The Collins lab.” Supposedly Collins reviewed all the data provided by HIS team. But it wasn’t until a reviewer for Oncogene discovered fraudulent data in yet another paper from Collins’ lab that the fraud was exposed. There is NO reference to this episode on Collins’ Wikipedia page. Those few articles listed by Google that make reference to Collins’ retracted papers portray him as a HERO (as if he had discovered the fraud, which he did not), and a VICTIM of a duplicitous graduate student named Amitav Haraj.
Reply to Smythe: How could we have overlooked Francis Collins the head of NIH? In a sense Collins is the ultimate upholder of marijuana’s Schedule I status. The Drug Enforcement Administration cites NIH findings to classify cannabis as harmful and of no known medical benefit. Dr. Francis Collins is a Fortunate One for sure. Keep blowing that whistle, Scott.
