A Misdirected Email: CPRIT Official Speaks of "New Regime" As Institute Denies Deepening Crisis
publication date: Oct 19, 2012
"The board chairman of the Texas cancer institute has something to say
to America’s premier scientists who are resigning from his organization’s peer
review committees: Good riddance.
“Better to get them all out of the way now,” wrote Jimmy Mansour,
chairman of the Oversight Committee of the Cancer Prevention and Research
Institute of Texas. “Gives us the prime opportunity to announce a new regime.”
Mansour, a telecommunications entrepreneur, composed this memo for
CPRIT executive director Bill Gimson and oversight board chairman Joseph Bailes,
but had mistakenly hit the Reply All button, sending the nasty epistle to a
resigning scientist.
The document, which came into public view because of Mansour’s
sloppiness at the keyboard, belittles scientists and the peer review process,
and inadvertently provides evidence for the case that troubles in Texas are
first and foremost about peer-reviewed science.
According to former reviewers who are continuing to submit letters of
resignation, CPRIT has moved away from reliance on peer review and into the
territory mainstream scientists classify as the wilderness.
Mansour’s email is also remarkable because it illustrates the reluctance
on the part of CPRIT officials to recognize that the institute that distributes
$300 million a year in state funds is, in fact, in the midst of a crisis.
The new “regime” would be run by “Dubois and his new Chair of the
Scientific review Panel,” Mansour wrote."
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