Political Quotes

“Earlier this year I learned about a case of research misconduct that happened at Iowa State University. A team of scientists was working on a vaccine to fight HIV. One of the researchers, Dr. Han, committed fraud to make it appear as though the vaccine for HIV was working. He purposely spiked the testing samples so it looked as if the vaccines actually fought HIV. Dr. Han's fraud helped his team get $16 million in national grant money from the National Institutes of Health or around here we refer to that as the NIH. NIH is part of the Department of Health and Human Services or what we refer to as HHS. HHS gives out billions of dollars in research grants every year. In 2013 NIH gave out over $20 billion in research grants. Obviously that is a huge amount of money by any standard. The government has a responsibility to make sure this money is well spent. Unfortunately, it looks as if the government is relying on the grant recipients to do oversight instead of the government seeing that the money is well spent. In this case officials at Iowa State University were unaware of the fraud until another team of scientists couldn't duplicate the results. Iowa State University took the problem very seriously and notified Health and Human Services. I compliment them for that. But if it weren't for Iowa State University's actions, I doubt the Government ever would have found out about this tremendous amount of fraud.…”