Is this an April Fool’s post? I’m not sure.
David Agus is the author of a book that included “at least 95 separate passages,” including my personal favorite (as reported by the LA Times): “Long sections of a chapter on the cardiac health of giraffes appear to have been lifted from a 2016 blog post on the website of a South African safari company titled, “The Ten Craziest Facts You Should Know About A Giraffe.”
It’s hard to know where to start with this. Maybe the first thing to note is that Agus is an oncologist and has no expertise on the cardiac health of giraffes. Who writes a book with an entire chapter on something he knows nothing about? Oh yeah, there were these guys . . . but at least when they were writing about something they knew nothing about, they wrote it in their own words.
I was particularly annoyed that Agus wrote, “I’m not pitching a tent to watch chimpanzees in Tanzania or digging through ant colonies to find the long-lived queen, for example . . . I went out and spoke to the amazing scientists around the world who do these kinds of experiments, and what I uncovered was astonishing.” Ummm, maybe this is the case with the ant colonies, but it obviously isn’t the case with the giraffes–I’m still stunned that he did an entire chapter on them! He didn’t speak with any scientists, “amazing” or otherwise. He just ripped off the website of a safari company.
I’d say, “What a loser,” but in the usual scheme of things this guy’s a winner. He still appears to be employed by USC–he’s the “founding director and CEO of the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine”–despite clearly violating their ethics code:
But that was a couple years ago. What’s the good doctor been up to lately?
18 Sep 2024: He’s featured in the Princeton alumni magazine, described as a “cancer specialist, researcher, and wellness advocate.” They forgot “author of a plagiarized book on giraffes”! Also this: “Sometimes he reminds patients that there is no miraculous cure-all.” I don’t know: plagiarism is a miraculous cure-all to writer’s block, is it not?
22 Oct 2024: He’s featured in Time Magazine: “‘Interventions that can affect outcome are what we need, and we need companies to put the capital up front and do the studies to show they can affect outcome,’ says Agus. ‘And once we do that, those are the technologies that we should all push and enable our patients to use, and they have to be accessible.'” And we should believe this, because . . . why, exactly? Because a rich USC med school professor with a demonstrated willingness to lie has money on the line? To be fair, the Time article does identify Agus as “founding director and co-CEO of the Ellison Institute of Technology.” But then I’d hope they’d take the next step and express a little skepticism about his motivations.
23 Feb 2025: TechCrunch reports: “Oracle co-founder [Larry Ellison] set out to reinvent agriculture on Hawaii’s Lāna’i Island, which he scooped up for $300 million back in 2012. . . . Ellison dreamed of AI-powered greenhouses and robot harvesters feeding the world sustainably. Instead, Sensei has been tripped up by tech snarls . . . and rookie mistakes. . . . Sensei, co-founded by a medical doctor [yup, David Agus, head of the “Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine”] and led currently by a tech exec who runs Sensei from Boston, has had small wins, reports the WSJ. Its lettuce and cherry tomatoes now appear at the island’s few local markets and restaurants. But constant delays, leadership shake-ups, and pricey blunders, including cannabis grow houses that needed to be gutted and rebuilt, highlight a tough truth: even bottomless funding is no match for the hard lessons of a specialized industry.”
Hmmm . . . I think the real lesson here is that copy-and-pasting material from a website on giraffes does not qualify you to run an agriculture company.
This was all a year after “Ellison-backed med tech startup Project Ronin closes doors . . . founded by Dave Hodgson, a tech leader with a history in medicine; David Agus, the cancer expert who treated Steve Jobs . . .; serial health entrepreneur Rowan Chapman; and Larry Ellison, Oracle founder and CTO.” Agus also treated Madonna, so, sure, why not throw a few million dollars at the guy.
What’s funny (actually not funny) to me is that people like Agus who are known liars still get trusted with money and resources in this way. The people in charge must think that Agus only lies to other people, never to them. Or maybe Agus is just a figurehead in these schemes: perhaps Ellison and USC are paying for his celebrity name, in which case they have a motivation to minimize his ethical transgressions.
So, to return to the first line of this post: Are USC and Larry Ellison fools for paying this guy? Are Princeton University, Time Magazine, Los Angeles magazine, and the New Yorker magazine fools for repeatedly promoting him? Or is this all transactional: they puff up his celebrity, and then they get to bask in the celebrity connection?
Is this an April Fools comment from ChatGPT? I’m not sure. Has anyone else gotten this?
https://errorstatistics.com/2025/04/01/leaked-a-private-message-from-chatgpt/
Do I contact Open AI?
Mayo
error statistics.com
A particularly depressing post, but this is why I read you. Thanks Andrew!
Hey, if I can make just one person every day a little bit unhappier, it’s all worth it!
+1
Quote from the blog post: “So, to return to the first line of this post: Are USC and Larry Ellison fools for paying this guy? (…) Or is this all transactional: they puff up his celebrity, and then they get to bask in the celebrity connection?”
I recently came across a paper by Martin (1992) titled “Scientific fraud and the power structure of science”. The author mentions several problematic issues in academia/science and notes that:
“Several of the common misrepresentations and biases are natural outgrowths of the hierarchies within scientific organisations:
misrepresentation in citations, false pictures of research in grant applications, appointments of cronies and exploitation of subordinates.” (p. 89) and “It is easy to see why many of these practices are standard: they serve the interests of the more powerful members of the research community.” (p. 89)
I thought this was an interesting viewpoint and a plausible description and explanation of several different problematic processes and issues in academia/science. Reasoning from that general viewpoint, perhaps it might indeed be the case that Princeton University, Time Magazine, etc. don’t care that much about previous misbehavior as long as their interests are served.
Anon:
My take on this is that the Princeton alumni magazine, Time magazine, etc., are staffed by busy people who feel pressure each week to fill up the space in their publications so they can go home and relax, play with the dog, etc.–so they’ll fill their pages with just about anything that fits one of their formulas, in this case the heroic scientist.
All things equal, I expect they’d prefer to publish true stories rather than false stories . . . but all things aren’t equal! True stories are constrained by the truth, whereas false stories can be a lot more exciting, also easier to write.
Quote from above: “True stories are constrained by the truth, whereas false stories can be a lot more exciting, also easier to write.”
I think there are beautiful and interesting stories to show and tell, but they may be hard to find. I don’t read newspapers, or magazine, or watch TV anymore, but when I still did I had this thought that if I was a celebrity and had to promote my new movie or book or whatever at some TV show I would make it “my thing” to make the last part of my time there be about some random audience member which I would just walk up to and ask the same three (or whatever) questions that might give interesting answers.
Maybe that would be boring a lot of the time, but it would only last 2 minutes or so. And maybe it would create funny or interesting moments, especially when people might think about the questions because they know I would be on the show. Perhaps Time Magazine could do something similar, and in doing so might present true stories which might be interesting and exciting and also easy to write as they kind of write themselves in the case of Q & A (in some form or version).
Speaking of alumni rags, Yale sends out a weekly email bragging about things Yale folks have done in the last week, and it’s actually pretty good: in general, anything even vaguely of interest will be worth clicking on (such as links to articles in the lamestream media by or interviewing Yale academics). Even the bragging fluff (usually a new collection in a library, art something or other, music/theater) will usually be at least justified bragging fluff.
Inversely, Technology Review (MIT) is much more of a mixed bag. When they’re critical, they can be pretty good, but too much of the time it’s high-tech boosterism that’s irritating, wrong, or both.
“All things equal, I expect they’d prefer to publish true stories rather than false stories ”
A highly doubtful claim.
All things being equal, they’d prefer to publish stories that generate a paycheck, preferably a larger one. “Truth” is a flexible concept in the media ad there are dozens of low-cost handy excuses for publishing trash. Only a few months ago it was vehemently demanded that everyone accept the “truth” that Biden was sharp as a tack. Now, without even the slightest embarrassement, we have dozens of “true inside stories” about when it was *really* recognized that biden’s mental acuity was a problem (1980 according to Republicans). Sell sell sell! :)
It’s hard to imagine a more hilarious joke than the idea that “the media” cares whether their stories are true or false. They’re like the careless bunnies: there’s nothing you can do to get them to control their lust. It’s pre-programmed. It’s genetic. The only controls are external: the lynx and the hawk. They weed out the careless bunnies and leave behind the careful ones. We’re about at that point now in the media population cycle: massive bunny overpopulation caused by the bunny lover feeding and lynx/hawk-protection programs. Tragically, the bunnies are suddenly on their own with hungry lynx and hawks circling. Oh my. And poor NPR about to be kicked out of it’s protective cage! :o
I forecast a decline in the bunny population.
If the false story generates a larger paycheck than the true story, that’s not “all else equal.”
What Andrew is suggesting is that if there’s a true story and a false story that would generate equal profit, they’d probably prefer to publish the true one. I think that’s true. But that’s not the choice they have: they can either put time and effort into fact-checking and research so they can publish the most interesting true story they can, or they can spend a lot less time and effort and publish something interesting whether it’s true or not. Given that choice, it seems they choose the latter.
Phil:
Yes. Also selection. We notice the bad stories that get reported and forget many of the good ones.
A December, 2023, article in the LA Times explains a lot.
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2023-12-08/nine-months-after-david-agus-scandal-publishers-are-still-sorting-out-plagiarism-mess
Agus’ books were written by a woman named Kristin Loberg. The “we” is apparently “her”. She also wrote books for Sanjay Gupta and David Perlmutter, also celebrity MD’s. Both have now acknowledged that she plagiarized in books she wrote for them. The response of the authors and publishers has been to reissue at least somewhat revised versions, and to delete previously glowing praise for Loberg from the books’ acknowledgements.
It seems it would take a major investigation to determine how much of these books still consists of material she wrote, how much of that she plagiarized, and how much might be attributed to their putative authors.
Gregory:
It could well be the coauthor did the actual plagiarism; i.e., Agus was not just too lazy to write the material in “his” book, he was also too lazy to plagiarize it!
But that doesn’t excuse his quote, “I went out and spoke to the amazing scientists around the world who do these kinds of experiments, and what I uncovered was astonishing,” or for putting his name on a book with stupid giraffe facts. Whether he did the plagiarism or just hired a plagiarist, he was misrepresenting himself. It’s his name on the book!
Recall USC’s misconduct rules. What do you think would happen if a student were caught plagiarizing and then offered the defense that, no, he didn’t really plagiarized, he just hired someone else to write his term paper and the person he hired was the plagiarist. That doesn’t sound like much of a defense to me.
Andrew–
Oh yeah, I agree– this is in no way exculpatory for Agus. To my mind, these further details make his transgressions look worse.
Speaking of being too lazy to do one’s own plagiarism, I’ve been looking for an excuse to mention this disaster here.
Jeff Hancock, a Stanford prof., handed in a document in a court case that included halucinated references. Oops.
https://minnesotareformer.com/2025/01/14/judge-rebukes-stanford-misinformation-expert-for-using-chatgpt-to-draft-testimony/
“Hancock’s citation of fake sources “shatters his credibility with this Court,” Provinzino wrote. While acknowledging that artificial intelligence software may have valid uses in legal settings, she concluded that “when attorneys and experts abdicate their independent judgment and critical thinking skills in favor of ready-made, AI-generated answers, the quality of our legal profession and the Court’s decisional process suffer.”
The judge makes repeated note of the fact that Hancock submitted his original document under penalty of perjury. “Signing a declaration under penalty of perjury is not a mere formality,” she wrote, but is rather an acknowledgement of the “gravity of the undertaking” and a mechanism for ensuring “truthtelling and reliability” as well as trust.”
The twat was billing his clients US$ 600.00 an hour. And couldn’t be bothered to check the references? Sheesh.
Since there was no mention of his being charged criminally for perjury, presumably he wasn’t. Sounds as though he dodged a bullet he (morally and legally) shouldn’t have.
David:
I guess that’s the kind of crappy consulting you’ll get if you only pay $600 an hour. Pay the man real money and he’ll do real work.
https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/12/02/misinformation-expert-used-ai-to-draft-testimony-containing-misinformation-about-ai/
Jeez what an asshole. I’m sure that if he’d been paid $1200 an hour he would’ve been more careful.
Right, think about getting paid per hour to use Word. I haven’t used it for over a decade but remember trying to put a figure on a page, then the text would reformat itself and all sorts of seemingly inscrutable things would happen that required hours of work to figure out.
Then theres this AI issue.
Let me try out a completely different angle on this. Agus apparently had entry into the Silicon Valley elite; maybe this was due to treating Steve Jobs, or maybe he was called on to do this because he was already moving in those circles. Anyway, suppose he’s in that in crowd.
Now: my hypothesis is that we are seeing the cultural/political correlate of the tech investment and profit surge of the past 25 years or so. There has been a massive runup in valuations (almost a third of the S&P 500), and lots of startups quickly generate huge capital gains. The VC industry has boomed right along with it. In a situation like that smart people and dumb ones, great ideas and dubious ones all get swept up in the wave, so that everyone looks smart and every idea is a winner. Agus, for all his faults, doesn’t come across as more problematic than Musk, Andreessen et al. And they are all pulling in and shooting out vast sums of money, so it’s got to be good, right?
I remember, during the peak of the housing bubble, that there were seminars all over on getting rich by flipping houses and lots of genius gurus. No doubt many of these geniuses had resumes that would look questionable after the bubble burst.
Again, this is hypothetical, and maybe the Agus story doesn’t fit this at all.
Quote from above: “I remember, during the peak of the housing bubble, that there were seminars all over on getting rich by flipping houses and lots of genius gurus. No doubt many of these geniuses had resumes that would look questionable after the bubble burst.”
I have thought about how to evaluate scientists, but have sort of let that go as a results of concluding (e.g. from reading Martin, 1992) that universities might not really primarily care about the same criteria I think might be important. Regardless, I wondered for instance how a scientist’s resume might be interpreted.
In a way, scientific progress might occur even if certain findings turn out not to replicate. So if a scientist has a certain paper on their resume which presents findings that later turn out to not replicate (simply stated for the time being) that does not necessarily look “bad” on their resume. I also thought of some ratio of grant money spent and connected papers published and subsequent citations of these papers counted but I reason that might also not necessarily tell something. My point is that it seems very hard to evaluate a scientist and/or their resume.
This is largely why I am wondering whether a very specific and particular focus and evaluation of a maximum of a handful of papers might be interesting. This has been proposed if I am not mistaken, but I am wondering whether there is in this case also a very specific focus on the actual content of the papers and not merely the same processes that might be problematic such as looking at the impact factor of the journals the handful of selected papers are published.
I wonder whether it might be possible to select a handful of papers and very particularly and purposefully try and see what the possible unique and worthy skills and features of the scientist might be that show in their selected papers. I would guess that this might more or less be done, at least in some cases, but I would be interested to read such a possible report concerning a specific scientist to see if something like that can be inferred from reading a handful of selected papers.
I think you need to be much more specific about what context you are thinking about: hiring decisions, promotion, tenure, grant awarding, prestigious awards, …? I would propose that any formulaic evaluation of a person’s work is fraught with problems – as it the opposite of subjective evaluations. This is one good reason not to rely on any individual’s evaluation, but to have group processes (imperfect so they are). But you mention a number of criteria – citations, close evaluation of a subset of papers, replicability of findings, grant money – all of which may matter and likely vary in individual cases and circumstances. The problem I have with formulaic approaches is that this holistic evaluation is what does not occur, and usually measurable things outweigh qualitative evaluations. That’s how we get the esteemed Bushman with 400+ (probably higher now) publications at an academic pinnacle, rather than a true evaluation of his contributions and behavior as a researcher.
I agree that this is depressing.
As for why people promote liars / frauds, I think one issue is that it’s very unusual to publish criticism. This seems an odd thing to say given the toxicity of discourse in society in general, but in academia, and maybe also tech/engineering, criticism of individuals is rare. It’s great that the LA times investigated, and that you’re posting (Andrew), but I’m sure this is dwarfed by positive press releases and puff pieces.
Quote from above: “As for why people promote liars / frauds, I think one issue is that it’s very unusual to publish criticism. This seems an odd thing to say given the toxicity of discourse in society in general, but in academia, and maybe also tech/engineering, criticism of individuals is rare.”
I have been thinking about this from time to time ever since I heard about “the incentives” 10+ years ago as some sort of explanation for problematic issues in psychological science/academia. I thought it was remarkable how little attention seemed to be given to individuals’ differences, personalities, choices, responsibilities, etc. in all of this.
Over the years I wrote several manuscripts which try to get some more attention for this, and I recently came across some papers that seem to include some explanatory variables, like certain personality traits, concerning things like questionable research practices. I think that’s a very good thing.
To be fair, it was just a plagiarized chapter on giraffes.
Since Jobs died whereas Madonna is still alive, the latter really should be better for a puff piece!
Ellison might not be paying attention at all to disputes about a chapter on giraffes. You know of Agus as a plagiarist, but you regularly blog about academic malfeasance, whereas Ellison spends that time enjoying his wealth.
Wonks:
Believe it or not, I spend more time enjoying my wealth than I do blogging about academic malfeasance. Just today I biked over to Brooklyn just for a couple of bagels!
They changed their name again. Ellison Medical institute without Ellison on the board. Must be due to the fact that Agus is working w Trump on collecting data on COVID???? I thought Trump doesn’t believe in COVID and all of the regular agencies are being defunded.
He is in cohorts w Tony Blair. Oxford Campus. A lot of money with no research coming out at his place on Exposition. It is locked up like a vault there. What is really happening? Except they do sell cups and tshirts.
Plus although they say Saint John’s Hospital is associated w Ellison cancer Institute. They do not have this posted anywhere at Saint John’s. Saint John’s hospital has their own cancer institute. Does he see any real patients? CBS dropped him. No one knows what he actually does except collect expensive art. And pay people high salaries to churn news for him and his cronies. Why does he keep changing the names of his non profits. And why is he making money and not us??? Turn him in!
JD