Clinic Figure Says Career Was Ruined : Investigation: UCI thanks manager who will testify before Senate panel.

For Marilyn Killane, the journey from respected health care professional to reviled whistle-blower in UC Irvine’s fertility scandal has been devastating.

She is a 56-year-old office manager who contends that alerting the university to trouble at its esteemed fertility clinic has ruined her career. She contends that she has been tarnished as someone who took $325,000 in “hush money” from officials trying to squelch the scandal. She says she has been called a liar, demoted to “paper clip jobs” and threatened with dismissal by top university officials.

But she could not have done otherwise, Killane said Tuesday in her first public comments.

“I told the university from the beginning, ‘This will be cleared up before I will rest,’ ” said Killane, who once managed the office of the embattled Center for Reproductive Health.

More than 15 months after her first formal complaint and a day before she was to tell her story to a state Senate committee, UCI officials Tuesday thanked Killane for her “personal courage.”

“She was the person who first alerted us to the financial irregularities and use of a non-FDA-approved drug at the center,” said UCI Executive Vice Chancellor Sidney Golub, reading from a prepared statement at a press conference called by Killane.

“Her allegations have been largely substantiated by investigators, resulting in UCI’s closing the clinic and other actions. . . . Ms. Killane is a consummate health-care professional who, from the beginning, put the well-being of patients ahead of her own career and personal goals.”

Still, Killane is angry. It shouldn’t have been this hard, she said.

For months after she made her initial allegations in February, 1994, disbelieving university administrators assailed her integrity, her reputation and her job performance, she said. She was bounced from job to job, then put on leave.

“I can’t tell you what this has done to my life,” said Killane, who was lured west in October, 1993, from a highly respected fertility clinic at Cornell University in New York.

Killane was the first of three whistle-blowers to trigger investigations into allegations of drug misuse, financial improprieties, research misconduct and embryo stealing at UCI’s much-vaunted clinic. Killane and her supervisor, Debra Krahel, also a whistle-blower, are scheduled to testify today before the Senate Select Committee on Higher Education.

These days, Killane said, she consoles herself with one thought: “I was right.”

Until this week, Killane was prohibited from talking about the scandal by a confidentiality clause in the $325,00 settlement she reached with the university. She would have forfeited $50,000 if she broke her silence. But the university agreed Friday to release her from that obligation because, Golub said, her identity had been made public by others.

Tuesday, she nervously fielded questions at the press conference called by her attorney to vindicate her.

“I know what I saw,” Killane said. “I know how to read an egg sheet. I know how patients should be treated and what should happen in reproductive health--and that did not happen here. I was appalled at what was happening.”

Killane said her job at the center was troublesome from the beginning. She arrived amid a university financial audit and was unable to officially assume her position for months while the investigation was underway, she said.

She had been on the job less than a week when she first noticed further financial troubles at the UCI fertility center. The doctors were taking home packets of cash, Killane said, and it wasn’t being reported to the university.

Then, in November, she heard rumblings of drug misuse and wrote a report, she said. The doctors were buying legal fertility drugs and selling them to patients for a 40% markup, Killane said. Other patients were sold a fertility drug imported by the center director, Dr. Ricardo H. Asch, from Argentina, which was not approved by the U.S. government.

It wasn’t just financial improprieties that gnawed at her, Killane said. She recalled an incident in which a doctor, whom she would not name, was debating whether to attend a lunch appointment or perform a scheduled surgery.

The doctor, she said, suggested having the patient anesthetized while another physician performed the procedure.

“She’ll think I did it,” Killane remembered the doctor saying.

After Christmas, when the drug allegations resurfaced, something snapped inside Killane, she said.

“That was it. I had had it. I couldn’t handle it.”

She took her concerns to Krahel, a senior UCI administrator.

“She was the only one who really listened to me,” Killane said. “Finally, I thought I had somebody who shared a concern of mine.”

But when Krahel pursued the matter, university officials accused them and a third whistle-blower, Carol Chatham, of “a conspiracy” against the university, they said.

“I didn’t even know what a whistle-blower was,” Killane said. I said, ‘What did you call me?’ . . . All I wanted was a job and for the doctors to clean up their acts. Well, I didn’t get a job and the doctors didn’t clean up their acts.”

After she reported the alleged drug misuse, she said, Asch never spoke to her again. Krahel told her that university officials were pushing for her termination. She was transferred, she said, to “paper-clip” jobs that were beneath her qualifications. And in May, the doctors wrote a letter indicating that they would not allow her back on the premises.

In a September letter, an attorney for the three women repeated the allegations of misconduct and accused the university of a “common scheme of retaliation.”

UCI, obligated under state law to probe the retaliation charges, began an investigation. A report on the findings by two University of San Diego law professors has not been released by the university, despite repeated requests from legislators, attorneys and the media.

Once the charges of retaliation were made, said the whistle-blowers’ attorney, Daniel John Yakoubian, the three women became targets.

“They became the victims. They were accused of wrongdoing. Their careers were sidetracked if not destroyed.”

Yakoubian said the women met with “extreme resistance” at first.

“From Day 1, they were really concerned that this was going to be a cover-up,” he said. “I had to persuade them to keep their peace . . . that investigations were going on. At one point, it seemed the university began to take it more seriously. . . . The genie was out of the bottle. There was no way they could cover it up.”

Killane said she is most angry not for herself but on behalf of the fertility center’s patients.

“I’m please that this won’t happen to new patients who walk in that door. Somebody will finally start watching how studies and research is done. They’re producing human life . . . and these children are entitled to know what their medical histories are.”