Ex-UCSD Scientist Loses New Job : Slutsky’s References Didn’t Check, Medical Group Says

Four months after resigning from the UC San Diego School of Medicine amid allegations that he falsified heart research data, Dr. Robert Slutsky has lost a new job as a cardiologist with a group practice in Long Island, N.Y., officials said Friday.

Dr. Isobel Pollack, medical director of the Health Insurance Plan (HIP) of Greater New York, said the plan’s medical-control board declined Wednesday night to approve Slutsky as a doctor caring for HIP patients at the East Nassau Medical Group in Hicksville.

“He was not able to produce references from the people he should have,” Pollack said. After HIP told the medical group Slutsky had not been confirmed, Pollack said, “I have been informed that he has been terminated.”

Meanwhile, the editor of a medical journal based in North Carolina said he has received a letter apparently from Slutsky’s attorney asking to retract two reports not among those the university says were false. Charles Putman, editor of Investigative Radiology, said he has asked his lawyers to check the validity of the letter and clarify the scope of the retraction.

Slutsky’s lawyer, Michael D. Brown, did not answer messages left Friday at his New York City office. Neither Brown nor Slutsky has answered repeated phone calls.

Slutsky, a 36-year-old researcher up for appointment to a professorship as UCSD’s cardiac radiologist, submitted his resignation April 30 after faculty members considering his promotion questioned some of his research data, Associate Medical School Dean Paul J. Friedman has said.

Friedman said a committee appointed to investigate concluded that Slutsky had falsified data in two published reports and one unpublished one. A second committee is now reviewing all of Slutsky’s estimated 120 published papers, Friedman said.

On Friday, Pollack said the medical-control board could not approve Slutsky because he failed to supply appropriate references. She would not elaborate on the board’s discussions, which she said are confidential.

But she said the issue before the board was Slutsky’s lack of references, not the findings of the UCSD investigation.

HIP, a health maintenance organization with about 900,000 members, offers medical services through contracts with group practices, like the one that hired Slutsky earlier this summer. Pollack said 95% of the groups’ patients are HIP members.

Friedman said Friday that he, the university and members of Slutsky’s department have believed all along “that he ought to be given an opportunity to practice.” He said the university does not want the publicity around the case “to make it impossible for him to have a fair opportunity to be rehabilitated and practice.”

In fact, Friedman said that after Slutsky resigned, the radiology department seriously considered “the possibility that he might come back and finish his residency under very close supervision with no research responsibilities, and therefore be given another tool for professional life afterward. . . .

“The people who knew him personally, and felt very bad about the outcome of the revelations of his dishonesty, felt that he should be given a chance to pull his life together and pursue it.”

Friedman added, “There are those people who say he is a perfectly competent professional and he can take care of patients in an intelligent fashion. There are others who say that someone who has shown a lack of moral sense shouldn’t be trusted in dealing with patients. I think it’s fair to characterize that as a philosophical difference.”