Top Psychiatrist Leaves Harvard Post After Plagiarism Allegations

A graduate student’s discovery of plagiarisms while reading 20-year-old medical journals has led to the resignation of one of the nation’s top psychiatrists from Harvard Medical School, officials of the university said Monday.

Dr. Shervert Frazier, who once headed the National Institute of Mental Health, resigned last week as a Harvard professor and as director of McLean Hospital, a psychiatric institution affiliated with the university.

Frazier resigned after the medical school’s Faculty Conduct Committee investigated and concluded there was plagiarism in four papers he wrote and published between 1966 and 1975, Dean Daniel C. Tosteson said in a letter to the medical school’s faculty.

The dean’s letter, dated Nov. 23, was made public by the university Monday. Both Frazier and Tosteson were out of town and unavailable to comment Monday, Harvard spokesman Peter Costa said.

Dr. S. James Adelstein, dean of academic programs at the medical school, said Frazier, 67, did not dispute the committee’s finding but said the plagiarism had resulted from lax work methods, not from any intent to deceive.

Paul Scatena, 28, a graduate student at the University of Rochester who was researching medical literature on pain, brought the old articles to the attention of Harvard officials in August.

Frazier borrowed portions of articles from Scientific American, Clinical Neurosurgery and other publications, Adelstein said. He said the four Frazier papers in question appeared in medical review journals or textbooks, one of which was the American Handbook of Psychiatry.

Frazier was a professor of psychiatry at Harvard from 1972 until 1984, when he left to become director of the National Institute of Mental Health in Rockville, Md.