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Under the covers were a strange assortment of offenses. In general, Poisson violated the rules of the study he was part of, making his results not comparable with the data from other researchers. For example, the study required that the patients be operated on within 28 days after breast cancer was diagnosed. But Poisson let women into the study who had waited a longer period of time before having surgery. When necessary, he falsified dates in the reports he sent to the study's coordinators at the University of Pittsburgh. Asked later to explain his actions, the doctor said he was trying to make advanced treatment -- financed by research grants -- available to as many women as possible. But Poisson's work had other flaws, including reports on lab tests never done.
There is no evidence, however, that any patient was harmed by what the doctor did. "The irregularities were very minor," Poisson told Time. "But the way they are described ((in news accounts)) looks very awful." On one point he is adamant: he did not order up progress reports on a dead woman. A staff member did that without his knowledge, he claims, and has been fired.
Poisson's motivation may have been a desire to make his studies as big and successful as possible. Observes Dr. Jacques Jolivet, a cancer specialist at Montreal's Notre Dame Hospital: "Poisson's a proud man -- proud to say that he puts most of his patients in trials, proud to get grants, proud to get his name on research papers. It was a long ego trip. He just lost it at one point and wound up twisting the data."
After Poisson's Pittsburgh collaborators discovered the fabrications in 1990, they turned over the evidence to the U.S. government. The Office of Research Integrity made its own investigation and documented 115 instances of fraud. By February 1993, ORI had found Poisson "guilty of scientific misconduct." He declined the opportunity for a hearing, and a brief summary of the investigation was published in the June 1993 Federal Register.
Poisson was demoted at his hospital and barred from participating in U.S.-funded research for the next eight years. The National Cancer Institute started considering ways of retrieving $1 million in funding given to Poisson. Yet there was no retraction in the scientific press, no contrite announcement at a cancer conference. "Not everyone reads the Federal Register," complains Dr. Jerome Kassirer, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, in which two of the disputed studies were published. "It would have been nice to have known in case we needed to prepare a response."
Why did neither the government nor the University of Pittsburgh get the word out to doctors and patients? Their answer: scientists quickly determined that the scandal wouldn't affect the current wisdom about how to treat breast cancer; there was no need to alarm people unnecessarily. "We knew we weren't facing a public-health disaster," explains Dr. Dorothy Macfarlane of ORI.