Fresh Comment

Marcy Darnovsky of the Center for Genetics and Society has left a new comment on the Flamm item below. Among other things, she says there were a number of concerns with the Cha grant that were not mentioned in the item about Flamm. She is absolutely correct. We also did not mention that CIRM's scientific reviewers had no idea of the controversy surrounding Cha when they approved the grant. The scientific reviewers knew the name of the applying organization at the time of the review but it was kept secret from CIRM directors when they later ratified the reviewers' decision in public session. That secrecy is part of the official CIRM process. One CIRM official told us later that the Cha grant would not have been approved by the scientific panel if they had been informed of the controversy.

CGS on CHA: Pushed or Jumped?

That was the headline on a piece on Biopolitical Times concerning the $2.6 million grant from the California stem cell agency to a Los Angeles subsidiary of a Korean business, headed by a controversial scientist.

Jesse Reynolds of the Center for Genetics and Society wrote skeptically about the explanations involved in the withdrawal, declaring that they "seemed a bit disingenuous."

"Regardless," he said, "the outcome is the right one."

Text of CHA Statement

Here is the complete text from Jean Yi, CEO, CHA Regenerative Medicine Institute, concerning her firm's withdrawal of its application for a $2.6 million grant from the California stem cell agency. The statement was supplied by Tony Knight of Sitrick and Company, a PR firm working for CHA. (See the "grant withdrawn" item below.)

"CHA Regenerative Medicine Institute (CHARMI) more than adequately addressed the baseless criticism leveled at the CIRM selection process by submitting documentary evidence of CHARMI's status as a registered non-profit corporation in California and tax exemption approvals by federal and state authorities. We think the process was needlessly politicized by CIRM's critics. Nevertheless, we are withdrawing because the last thing we want to do is be the source of any impairment to CIRM's current level of well-earned public support."

CHA Grant Withdrawn, Burnham Grant Denied

A California subsidiary of a Korean firm caught in an international plagiarism flap has bailed out of a $2.6 million grant from the California stem cell agency.
Arlene Chiu, chief scientific officer of the $3 billion California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, told the agency's directors at a Wednesday meeting in San Diego, that CHA Regenerative Medicine Institute of Los Angeles (CHA RMI) withdrew its application on Sept. 28 following a lengthy administrative review.

She did not elaborate on the matter. She referred questions to Tamar Pachter, general counsel for CIRM, who told us that it would be more appropriate to request the CHA information under California's open records law, a process that takes some time. CIRM directors did not comment on the matter.

John M. Simpson, stem cell project director of the Foundation of Taxpayer and Consumers Rights of Santa Monica, Ca., told directors that withdrawal of the application and action involving a grant to the Burnham Institute "spoke very well of the staff and their diligence." He said it showed CIRM was "serious about standards."

William Heisel of the Los Angeles Times reported that
Jean Yi, the CHA institute's chief executive, said it withdrew its application because of criticism that it was not a true nonprofit

Heisel continued:

"'CHA Regenerative Medicine Institute (CHARMI) more than adequately addressed the baseless criticism,' Yi said in a written statement. 'We think the process was needlessly politicized. . . . Nevertheless, we are withdrawing because the last thing we want to do is be the source of any impairment to [the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine's] current level of well-earned public support.'"

Pachter told us that CHA RMI had met the legal requirements for California nonprofit status.

CIRM directors approved the grant to CHA last March following a closed-door review. The review failed to turn up the fact that the parent of CHA RMI, CHA Health Systems, was headed by scientist Kwang-Yul Cha, who was enmeshed at the time in an international plagiarism dispute

Following disclosure of the Cha controversy, Simpson criticized CIRM's secretive grant award process. He said CIRM was "burned" because of its closed door review of the grant applications. Marcy Darnovsky, associate director of the Center for Genetics and Society of Oakland, Ca., said, "The leadership of CHA Health Systems has a shadowed recent history, including a lawsuit that alleges the director of its fertility center lied in order to obtain a woman’s eggs."

One of those alleging plagiarism, Alan DeCherney, editor of the Fertility and Sterility Journal, in May retracted his allegations of plagiarism and perjury.

Chiu also said another grant approved by directors last spring was rejected during the administrative review that is conducted on all approved grants before the checks actually go out. Chiu said the principal investigator on the $638,000 grant, David Smotrich, did not meet the criteria of being an on-site, fulltime employee of the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, Ca.

In its public review of the, CIRM said last Febarury, "This proposal is exactly the type of research that CIRM should be funding. The personnel is second to none, and it could not have been funded by NIH(National Institutes of Health.).

Terri Somers of the San Diego Union-Tribune wrote:

"Smotrich, who runs an in-vitro fertilization practice in La Jolla, is a member of Burnham's clinical faculty. He has also started a stem cell bank that is collecting donated frozen human embryos left over after the in-vitro fertilization process but no longer wanted by women trying to have children.

"From those embryos, Smotrich and scientists from the Burnham have been working to derive stem cells. He and a team that includes Burnham researchers Evan Snyder and Jeanne Loring sought the grant to fund work that Smotrich and other benefactors have underwritten to date.

"The standards of this particular grant put an independent research facility, such as the Burnham, at a disadvantage compared with an academic/medical facility such as UCSD, where clinical faculty can see patients in an office on campus, said Snyder and Smotrich.

"'It's frustrating,' Smotrich said last night. 'But hopefully it's just a hiccup, and there will be other ways to get funding. Perhaps future (grant applications) will be written differently. This is a learning process for everyone.'"

-Trb








http://www.latimes.com/features/health/medicine/la-me-cha4oct04,1,828119.story?coll=la-health-medicine&ctrack=1&cset=true

More on Cha Retraction

Both the Los Angeles Times and The Scientist magazine have reported on the retraction involving Alan DeCherney and Kwang-Yul Cha, which we carried on June 7.

Here are the links to the story in the Times by William Heisel and the piece in Scientist byAndrea Gawrylewski.

Fertility and Sterility Editor Retracts Comments About Cha

The editor of the Fertility and Sterility Journal has retracted and apologized for his remarks alleging plagiarism and perjury linked to Kwang-Yul Cha, a South Korean scientist whose organization includes a Los Angeles lab that was approved for a $2.6 million California stem cell grant.

The May 31 letter was written by Alan DeCherney to Cha following articles in the Los Angeles Times and The Scientist concerning DeCherney's allegations. The charges received additional attention after CHA RMI in Los Angeles successfully competed for the CIRM grant.

Following approval of the research funds, two organizations that monitor CIRM said the news reports raised troubling questions.

Here is the text of the DeCherney letter, written on the letterhead of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. The letter was supplied to the California Stem Cell Report by a representative of the Cha organization.

"Dear Dr. Cha,

"I am writing to apologize for the distress and any reputational damage my statements to The Scientist (February 20, 2007) and the Los Angeles Times (February 18, 2007) have caused you and your organization. Considering the facts of the matter, I consider my references to 'plagiarism' and 'perjury' to be inaccurate and regrettable. I hereby retract them and give you permission to forward this letter to the authors of both articles, and to their editors, for their information. You may use this letter in full form publicly in any way that you wish.

"I regret that I did not contact you or the other authors earlier to determine the facts of the matter, since it was brought to my attention more than a year ago. Please accept my apology for my hasty remarks to the reporters.

"After checking our records, I acknowledge that Dr. Jeong-Hwan Kim's name was included as an author when the manuscript was originally submitted, though I am not aware of the circumstances that ultimately led to his exclusion from the list of authors. I also acknowledge the fact that two formal requests were made in 2006 (after publication of the article in F&S) asking that Dr. Kim be added to the article as an author and that I did not respond to either of them.

"I want to emphasize that we found no scientific fault with your paper: "Quantification of mitochondrial DNA using real-time polymerase chain reaction in patients with premature ovarian failure," published in Sterility and Fertility. In accordance with the press release issued by the Fertility & Sterility board in April, we determined that you were not responsible for the dual publication. While the Board did not consider the issue of authorship, I have no reason to believe that you should not receive credit as first author. This would be consistent with the customary practice in the United State of the Corresponding Author providing the appropriate authorship credits.

"We hope that this will not discourage you and your scientific colleagues from submitting original research articles to Fertility and Sterility in the future.

"Sincerely,

Alan DeCherney, MD"

Funding of all the grants approved in March, including CHA RMI, has not yet begun. CIRM is reviewing them all as part of its normal practice to assure that each grantee can comply with the terms of the grant.

If you are interested in a PDF copy of the DeCherney letter, please send a request to djensen@californiastemcellreport.com. If you would like to read more on this subject, we have posted a number of items in March and April. You can find by using the search term CHA.

Coverage on the Cha Retraction

The latest doings in the Cha affair were reported today in the Los Angeles Times and The Scientist magazine, following the report on this site yesterday that the article in question was being retracted by the journal that published it.

William Heisel of the Times began his story by saying:

"A U.S. medical journal will retract an article that set off an international plagiarism dispute but will take no action against the lead author, a prominent South Korean scientist whose Los Angeles institute is in line to receive state funds for stem cell research."

Alison McCook of The Scientist had a similar story but with less detail.

Duplicate Publication: Journal Retracts Cha Article

The Fertility and Sterilityjournal has apparently retracted on grounds of "duplicate publication" a paper also involved in allegations of plagiarism by Korean scientist Kwang-Yul Cha.

The matter became of interest in California after the state's stem cell agency approved a $2.6 million research grant for a subsidiary of Cha's Korean organization.

Tony Knight, a spokesman for Cha, sent a copy of the press release announcing the journal's action to the California Stem Cell Report. The release, however, does not yet appear to be on the Fertility and Sterility journal web site. We have queried the journal concerning the information, which did not address the plagiarism allegations.

Here is the statement from Fertility and Sterility as relayed by Knight. A statement from Cha Health Systems follows along with a link to a piece in The Scientist magazine today on the matter.

"For immediate release: April 26, 2007

"The December 2005 issue of /Fertility and Sterility/ included an article entitled “Quantification of Mitochondrial DNA Using Real-time Polymerase Chain Reaction in Patients with Premature Ovarian Failure.” The article was originally published in the /Korean Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology /(/KJOG/) in 2004, under a different title, with some authors different from those listed in the publication appearing in /Fertility and Sterility/.

"Based on the prior publication of the article, which is contrary to the standards of /Fertility and Sterility/ and medical and scientific publishing, /Fertility and Sterility /has decided to retract the article and will publish that fact in an upcoming issue of /Fertility and Sterility/. This decision was based only on the issue of duplicate publication and does not reflect on the scientific validity of the paper.

"Dr. Sook-Hwan Lee was listed as corresponding author of each version of the article. Dr. Lee has admitted responsibility for the duplicate publications of the article and states that none of the other persons listed as authors had knowledge that the article submitted to /Fertility and Sterility/ had been previously published in KJOG.

"After carefully considering the facts available to it, /Fertility and Sterility/ has determined that Dr. Lee will not be allowed to publish materials in /Fertility and Sterility/ for the period of three years. No action will be taken as to any of the other persons listed as authors of the /Fertility and Sterility/ article, Kwang-Yul Cha, MD, PhD; Hyung-Min Chung, PhD; Kwang-Hyun Baek, PhD; Sung-Won Cho, MS, and Kyu-Bum Kwack, PhD."

The Cha Health Systems statement said:

"The (journal) said its decision to retract the article was based only on the issue of duplicate publication. We were hopeful that the paper would not be retracted, but we are pleased that the board recognized its scientific merit. We have said from the beginning that Kwang-Yul Cha, MD, PhD; Hyung-Min Chung, PhD; Kwang-Hyun Baek, PhD; Sung-Won Cho, MS, and Kyu-Bum Kwack, PhD. knew nothing of the paper’s prior publication. We are gratified that the /F&S/ board reached the same
conclusion."

The Scientist magazine article on the matter did not contain information on the journal action, but said it had not made a decision on how to handle the plagiarism issue.

Fresh Comments

Lawrence Ebert has posted a new comment on the CHA item below. "Faye" has posted a comment on "hidden economic interests" on the "Fresh Comment" post from 3/20/07.