Letter Seeks to Reassure, Skirts UCI Controversy
Hoping to reassure financial supporters and others, the director of UCI’s cancer center has sent out a brief letter that sidesteps most of the controversy surrounding the institution, focusing instead on a more obscure issue.
Dr. Frank L. Meyskens Jr. said in the letter he released publicly Tuesday that guidelines for medical research won’t hinder the availability of new treatments.
The letter said that UCI officials must balance the credibility of the faculty, “desperation of our patients” and research guidelines.
The letter, mentioning only a “series of stories” in local newspapers, doesn’t address questions arising from recent public disclosure about the alleged wrongdoing of former UCI faculty member Dr. John Hiserodt and federal investigations into his research activities.
“My faculty is concerned,” Meyskens said in an interview, “but it hasn’t affected us in our day-to-day business.”
A UCI internal inquiry last year found that Hiserodt, hired in 1993 while under federal investigation for falsifying research reports at the University of Pittsburgh, had sent an unapproved treatment to Florida for use on a terminally ill girl. The 8-year-old girl’s father had pleaded with Hiserodt to send the treatment. Hiserodt, who went on leave during the inquiry, resigned effective Jan. 1, 1998.
Though his Dec. 10 letter avoided mentioning the controversy, Meyskens alluded to the help Hiserodt gave the Miami Beach girl, who died in September 1996.
“Although . . . oversight guidelines appear to hinder the availability of a new treatment, nothing could be farther from the truth. Strict guidelines are set up so both patients and investigators are protected and so that both the patient of today and the patients of tomorrow benefit,” he wrote.
“In our society we go to great extremes to save the one, but day-to-day the correct decisions are frequently less clear and the ‘right’ answer fraught with ambiguity,” he wrote.
Meyskens, 53, came to UCI nine years ago to establish the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.
In the interview in his office Tuesday, he said that after returning from a six-month sabbatical in the fall of 1995, he was told there were problems in a cancer center research lab studying “mixed lymphocyte culture” treatments.
Meyskens said research was “being pushed” too fast and without adequate oversight.
He also said he was alarmed to find Hiserodt working there after the doctor had been warned repeatedly by UCI administrators that he was not permitted to work at the cancer center because of the federal sanctions.
In 1994, a year after he was hired at UCI, Hiserodt was barred for five years from working on federally funded research after the National Institutes of Health found that he had falsified research data at the University of Pittsburgh in 1990.
Meyskens said he immediately suspended all research in the lab and formed a committee to determine if any improprieties had occurred. In a Dec. 1, 1995, report, the committee found sloppy research practices and poor oversight.
Meyskens said he lacked the authority to investigate the most egregious allegations that surfaced because any official university inquiry and subsequent sanctions against UCI researchers would be left up to UCI’s Office of Research and Graduate Studies.
The university never informed Meyskens of any discipline against those involved. UCI has said that its internal inquiry led to a shutdown of the laboratory and to reprimands against three researchers.
Meyskens did clarify an assertion made last week by Dr. Yutaka Kikkawa, who resigned Monday as chairman of UCI’s pathology department. Kikkawa hired Hiserodt.
In a report sent last week to UCI Chancellor Ralph J. Cicerone, Kikkawa said the dying girl’s father, Robert Turken, had persuaded then-White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta to ask Meyskens to include his daughter in an experimental cancer treatment in the mid-1990s.
Meyskens confirmed what Panetta said last week--the two had never spoken.
However, Meyskens said Turken did call him one Saturday morning pleading for UCI to let his daughter be treated with the experimental cell cultures. Turken, according to Meyskens, said he had powerful friends, including the White House chief of staff.
On Tuesday, Turken denied making such a statement.
