UCI Official Quits Amid Uproar Over Ex-Researcher

Fed up with public scrutiny over his hiring of a cancer researcher under federal investigation, the man who built UC Irvine’s pathology department resigned Monday as its chairman but will remain a professor.

“I’m a proud man with an impeccable reputation,” a weary Yutaka Kikkawa said Monday night, sitting on the sofa of his Lemon Heights home. “But now I’m portrayed as an idiot” for hiring Dr. John C. Hiserodt five years ago. “Resigning is the price that an administrator has to pay.”

In a one-paragraph letter to Thomas Cesario, dean of UCI’s college of medicine, Kikkawa resigned “effective today” and sought a one-year sabbatical.

In the interview, he complained that media accounts of the controversy have been unfair. “I don’t want to be associated with this anymore,” he said. “I’ve got better things to do with my time and life.”

At the time Hiserodt was hired in 1993, the researcher was under investigation for falsifying research data at the University of Pittsburgh. A year later, while he was at UCI, the National Institutes of Health found the charges to be true and barred him from working on federally funded research for five years.

Hiserodt now is at the center of a new controversy at UCI. The university found in an internal inquiry last year that he had sent an unapproved experimental treatment to Florida to try to save the life of an 8-year-old girl dying of a brain tumor. The university, finding lax oversight and other violations, shut down the laboratory where he worked.

This fall, the federal Food and Drug Administration opened criminal and regulatory investigations into his actions.

Kikkawa’s resignation is the first personnel change at the university as a result of the controversy since it became public 10 days ago.

Richard Elbaum, a UCI spokesman, said it is unusual for a department chair to resign in the middle of his appointment.

Typically, an administrator who resigns requests an immediate sabbatical to reestablish his research, Elbaum said. Faculty members are entitled to a sabbatical after seven years and are paid either two-thirds of their full salary for a year or their full salary for two quarters.

Monday night, Kikkawa continued to defend his decision to hire Hiserodt, crediting the researcher with almost superhuman abilities.

“He was miles apart from the other candidates with his accomplishments,” Kikkawa said. “I was very impressed and felt he could use a second chance--not just him but mankind.”

Kikkawa has said he and the seven members of a faculty committee knew Hiserodt was under federal investigation for his work at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, but they did not alert senior officials at UCI.

“We did not see any reason to tell anyone about it,” Kikkawa said in an interview last week.

Kikkawa said Monday that Hiserodt convinced him that the investigation at Pittsburgh would clear him.

“I strongly believe that a man is innocent until proven guilty,” Kikkawa said. “[Hiserodt] had many strong letters of recommendation, and I listened to him and believed him when he said he would be cleared.”

During UCI’s internal investigation, Hiserodt took a leave of absence. He resigned Jan. 1, 1998. Last week, he went on a paid leave from his post as vice president of Meyer Pharmaceuticals in Newport Beach, one of the companies that provided funding for the UCI lab in which he worked.

Since Hiserodt’s resignation, Kikkawa had allowed him to continue teaching second-year medical students as a volunteer faculty member. That ended as news of the FDA investigations became public.

While he defends Hiserodt’s abilities, Kikkawa does fault him for shipping the unapproved cells to a Florida hospital where terminally ill Jennifer Turken was being treated for a brain tumor. She died in September 1996, a few days after a dosage was given to her.

“Many scientists aren’t very good at knowing the regulations, but I don’t excuse him for ignoring the rules. . . . He should have known better,” Kikkawa said.

Last week, Kikkawa sent a three-page report to UCI Chancellor Ralph J. Cicerone retracing Hiserodt’s hiring and his research difficulties and praising his abilities.

In the report, Kikkawa said that the dying girl’s father, Robert Turken of Miami Beach, had persuaded then-White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta to ask the head of UCI’s cancer center to include his daughter in an experimental clinical trial for adult cancer patients in the mid-1990s.

Panetta has said he didn’t know the girl or her family and he never contacted the cancer center on behalf of a patient. Turken also denied he knew or contacted Panetta.

Cesario said the letter was the first he had heard of Panetta’s interest in the girl.

Kikkawa, a native of Japan, came to UCI in 1988 as chairman of the new department of pathology and was instrumental in hiring the 19 other pathologists who work in the department today.

He graduated from the University of Tokyo School of Medicine and, from 1959 to 1976, was a professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. From 1976 to 1988, the board-certified pathologist chaired the pathology department at New York Medical College.

Kikkawa had been in the middle of a five-year appointment as chairman. the appointment was scheduled to end June 30, 2000, when he could have been reappointed.

Kikkawa said the allegations against Hiserodt could be true, but as an administrator, he had to trust the integrity of his researchers.

“We’re a pretty independent bunch and basically take care of ourselves,” he said. “I can’t, for example, monitor everything that the faculty and researchers do. I have to assume that everybody is doing the right thing. Fortunately, that’s the case 99.9% of the time.”

Times staff writer Esther Schrader contributed to this report.