Ithaca Cornell was a blessing I could only appreciate after I became the Ithaca James missed. Unlike all his brothers who went to Ithaca College in London, James missed the deadline, so had to go to Regents College in London. Even today, I could not find any scientific explanation for why I caught up with some trivial things, missed the bus, caught up with some other trivial things again, missed the bus again, just to catch the wrong bus so I could lose in the right moment for James to pick up his Ithaca on the streets he grew up, and for me to meet the Irish I had pretended to be in Ithaca Cornell.
Where I was from, the moral was demolished. If there was any preserved by the ideologist bubble delicately built by loving parents, it was crushed by June 4th’s gunshots. Cornell was a perfect escape from a generation of anger of betrayal by your own government, a perfect hideaway to restore the normality of society and to rebuild the trust and faith once lost. I was more shocked to see Cornell’s honor system than to see anyone cheating. Cornell was the academic excellence and achievement of everyone’s dream. Cornell was the highest standard of ethics that everyone in Cornell was in. So one semester, when we all suddenly received an email to ask everyone to take a mandated ethics class, no one had any idea what was ethics. For experiments boggled minds, the ethics sounded extremely boring. I prepared to sleep through that 2 hour class just not to get in trouble. However, the class turned out to be more interesting and memorable than I thought. The ethics class was about the forbidden cheating. It was to tell everyone the dark side of sciences by case after case of scientific misconducts that we would have never heard of by any other chances. We heard many untold Cornell’s shocking tales. There was this anonymous Cornellee who faked all his experimental data because no technology was available at his time to examine his theory. But, ironically, he turned out to be a genius later on when the technique was developed to prove his theory all correct. Amazed, we wondered, unsympathetic to his fate of being kicked out of Cornell, “how did he do that?”
Besides school, I was drawn into Cornell’s co-op, bible study, upstate New York’s endless waterfalls and finger-lakes, and lost my identity in the exotic Celtic drum beats and the massive medieval war Pennsic (see photos below), I barely knew who had won the Noble Prize. So we heard “David Baltimore Case” before we were mind-blown to figure out he was the Noble Prize winner and the real reason that we all had to take this class and got to hear those unspeakable tales. If I knew I would have something to do with David Baltimore later in my life, I probably would have paid more attention to the class. The instructor was trying to end the class by asking the question “Are you going to be a whistle-blower?” No one had known enough about the consequence of being a whistle-blower to give the answer she wanted. After realizing that the university’s effort to try to protect those innocent and brilliant young minds was wasted, the instructor desperately spent the last few minutes of her class to import the idea of “DO NOT BE A Whistle-Blower” into our clueless heads. The ethics was soon to be forgotten. Only history was left to remember to prove she was right. David Baltimore resigned from New York Rockefeller University, only to reappear in the west coast a few years later as the President of California Institute of Technology (CalTech). His whistle-blower had disappeared in history, no one could remember her name. David Baltimore was the head of AIDS vaccine research panel at the National Institute of Health (NIH). He was appointed to the oversight committee of California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) later and resigned again in connection with a $ 20 million HIV CIRM grant to UCLA AIDS institute and his out-of-state AIDs vaccine company. David Baltimore has more CIRM grants connections that have not been so visible, such as ~ $ 10 M to his own clan Yang Xu at UCSD.
Coming out of Cornell’s honor system, it was devastatingly demoralizing to see CIRM cheating Prop 71, cheating by professors, cheating organized through departments and institutes, cheating by prestigious universities and research institutes, cheating by the system I had rebuilt my trust and faith on. David Baltimore was known as a strong supporter of the highly controversial issue of stem-cell research. His famous argues include "Embryonic stem cells hold remarkable promise for reversing the devastation of human disease" and "To refuse to allow [the country] to participate in this exciting research would be an affront [an offense] to the American people, especially those who suffer from diseases that could one day be reversed by these miraculous cells" [The Wall Street Journal, 2002]. Despite that, David Baltimore, like all others in CIRM independent citizen oversight committee (ICOC) board, has not been able to perform the simplest duty of ICOC board required by the law, to ensure Prop 71 funds to go to human pluripotent stem/progenitor cell, known as human embryonic stem cells (hESCs), research and therapy, not to ensure Prop 71 funds to go to their own institutions and clans. They, who are deans and presidents of institutions holding the highest standards of ethics, all did just the latter, so one by one was got caught and resigned, and the new ones appointed by the State government officials would only turn out to be the same.
After Cornell, ethics had not become a constraint in my life until I received a hESC research award from NIH that ethics training was one of requirements of the award. Soon after California passed Prop 71, prestigious professors, most of them had zero stem cell research experience, suddenly became eligible for stem cell center directors overnight at California campus. Those directors also became eligible to teach ethics of stem cell research to others. In San Diego, there are Evan Snyder of Burnham and Larry Goldstein of UCSD. However, those directors who teach ethics have turned out to be rogue professors with so little ethics. They are more like stem cell mafia, not directing nor serving any stem cell research for the scientific community. The affiliation with stem cell center supported by public funds has become their bargain chip to be on papers and grants without having to do anything, turning the real stem cell research workforce into something like Jean Loring’s “professional collaborators” with no name, no title, no position, no recognition, so your hard work would be easily the director’s, if not, you may soon find yourself under legal action. These stem cell directors are extremely hard to reach. If you have any inquiries or need any help regarding shared research resource, stem cell research collaboration, communication, coordination, or anything you thought would be the directors’ job, you would never get any responses from those directors. But they have never been shy of receiving director’ glory for things they’ve never done in any public events, like interviews and speakers.
My former mentor Evan Snyder has also been on the editorial boards of many stem cell journals, including Cell Stem Cell, Regenerative Medicine, Stem Cell, Exp. Neurol., J. Stem Cell Research & Therapy, which have been his bargain chips to be on many other people’s papers of not his work. His editorial positions have allowed him to reject or stuck many of his competitors’ papers without even sending out for review, including mine, which has been the sad reason that I could not get my stem cell research, despite breakthroughs, published in any of those stem cell journals. I have never seen anyone with such a big appetite for data, which maybe the only reason he would suddenly become very friendly. He would tell you he could help you to get your data published, send him your data, not just regular ones, high defi ones, and he would come back for more and more. Then you would not hear anything about submissions for months or years from him, until you might accidently bump into his talks about your data, which most times would be twisted to fit into his purpose, without you in one of those meetings he loves to go, or it would come back with his collaborators on it with nothing else increased and become his hostage for you have to do more and more to give to him. After you finally realized that he has not done, and probably would never do, anything he promised again and again, it probably would be too late for you to try to publish these data you consider as your life and career. Your data have become his. He would use his director and editor position to retract those submissions and publications what he called repeat offenders and claimed his superior position for affiliation with Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine and not anyone else eligible for affiliation with public stem cell research facility, so your research can only be published through his mafia hands. If not, he would or would have his lab technician to make false allegations, complaints, and threats to authors, editors, and journals, and even resolute to pursuing legal action by Sanford Burnham institute and notifying NIH for those normal scientific activities of publishing scientific data to the scientific community. And you would end up thinking --- “what a hell, my only crime is I did the research, not him.”
If you would like to know how those center grants were done, here is an example. In 2005, Burnham received an Exploratory Center Grants for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research from NIH to establish one of ~ 6 national stem cell centers. I wrote/co-wrote 2 core projects (out of 3-4) and 3 pilot projects (out of 3-4), took my entire NIH K award data as the only human embryonic stem cell research data to put into the center grant, and replaced Mark Mercola’s cardiac project (not on hESCs) with my hESC cardiac project with Evan Snyder’s promise to be the Co-Investigator and Project Leader on the center grant. Right before the grant was sent out, I finally got some time to check the personnel assembled by Jean Loring. I was blown away because I could not find my name on it, neither my biosketch. Jean Loring has put ~ 20 people on the center grant application, most of them had never done anything, but excluded me on the team. The hESC center grant was awarded by NIH, citing outstanding hESC research. Evan Snyder became the PI and director, and Jean Loring became the co-PI and co-director responsible for hESC training classes. After Jean Loring took over, she excluded me from Burnham NIH funded stem cell center, claiming legal action if I would gain access. I protested with Burnham officials, but did not succeed. Later on, I was ready to apply for CIRM grant with all my hESC research data I have done, but Burnham grants officials denied to sign my hESC grant as the PI (principal investigator), instead, organized those professors who have never done any stem cell research to apply, and my hESC research and grants would end up to become Jean Loring’s again. I had a very tough time under Jean Loring’s regime, so finally I gave Evan Snyder the permission to put David Smotrich as the PI.
