The Scramble to Sort Out the Complicated Eggs Scandal

There’s nothing a university likes better than being singled out. Harvard and law. Johns Hopkins and medicine. Cal Tech and engineering.

UC Irvine and--what?

Until the last couple weeks, the end of that sentence would have had several possibilities, all of them good. Or, more important, none of them bad.

Now, the university is scrambling over . . . eggs. Now, the most abominable word that can be associated with a university--scandal--is in the air.

“Campuses are places where faculty goes to great lengths to earn the respect of their peers,” says a professor on another Orange County campus. “One way to do it is being perceived as moving the institution forward. For a while, these guys [at UCI] did just that. This was a shining star of the UCI program. It received international recognition.”

The professor is talking about UCI’s Center for Reproductive Health and its three doctors embroiled in a scandal over management and ethics. Did the doctors mismanage funds? Did they implant eggs in other women without the consent of the donors?

Imagine a kingdom with many lords of the manor; that’s what a university resembles, with its departments and research centers. Egos often approximate those of foreign potentates. They’re tolerated, even celebrated because their expertise can mean huge amounts of research dollars and prestige for a campus.

Conversely, it can be a fascinating backdrop for scandal, especially one involving cutting-edge science.

“Everybody’s read ‘Brave New World,’ ” the professor said. “This taps into the great fear that permeates so much of our culture, which is, ‘Will technology make life better or worse?’ ” If the allegations prove true, he said, it amounts to “children running around on the planet that they created without consent.”

I asked for his sense of what’s happening inside UCI these days. He said the upper echelons of the university probably want to distance themselves from the accused, which they already have done by filing a legal complaint against the three doctors. At the faculty level, he said, uncertainty might turn to anger if the allegations prove true and other professors later feel that the scandal affects their ability to receive grant money.

A UCI professor with whom I talked to this week said it’s important to realize that everybody at a university does not know what everyone else is doing. The consensus when the reproductive center opened was that it was good for the university, the professor said. But it’s not as though the center has been a source of ongoing conversation ever since, he said. “What do we know about what the physicists do, or what the neurobiologists do, or what the anthropologists do, or what the computer scientists do, or what the mechanical engineers do?”

The professor, who isn’t affiliated with the medical school and, in fact, wasn’t even sure where the reproductive center was located, said the situation presents an interesting possibility: “The three doctors could be guilty of every one of the accusations and, simultaneously, could have done an immense amount to help infertile couples have kids. So on the one hand you could justify having hundreds of people thinking they are a godsend and simultaneously have been abusive [of their positions]. Those are not mutually exclusive.”

Thus far, the doctors have disputed the university’s allegations against them.

Their protestations of innocence will probably dictate against any rush to judgment, the UCI prof said, as will another factor: “Academics are trained to be skeptical in a certain way. They may gossip, but there are very few people in positions outside the medical world to gossip about what goes on inside a medical clinic.”

And yet, it’s hard not to talk about it. Until the facts get sorted out, the dramatic potential remains high. On one side of the ledger are the reputations of acclaimed doctors and, by extension, the university. On the other side are the rights of patients and the specter of renegade science.

“The conventional wisdom is that these are outstanding doctors who were providing good, important professional medical service, doing interesting medical research and, consequently, people are surprised,” the professor said. “On the other hand, people are also cognizant that the chancellor wouldn’t go into a high-profile series of accusations against a clinic in [the] university unless there was a serious basis for making the charges. It’s sort of like, who knows? But there’s no basis for most of us to come to a conclusion, except to say, hmm.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.