Children's Hospital sues former researcher over data on a laptop after researcher sues hospital for discrimination
Children's Hospital is suing a researcher who left the hospital last year, charging he took potentially valuable data related to the development of new drugs when he left for Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
The suit, filed this week in US District Court in Boston, comes a couple months after the researcher, Isin Cakir, filed a discrimination suit with two other researchers against their boss at Children's and the hospital itself.
In its suit, Children's says that Cakir refused to hand over the laptop when he left, instead giving it to a local computer consultant with instructions to extract all the data from it - and not to give any of it to Children's.
The suit does not specify just what makes the data so valuable. However, Cakir spent four years at Children's working on drugs to treat obesity and diabetes, including a potential anti-obesity drug called celastrol.
According to the suit:
The Laptop Data is extremely valuable, constituting work that Defendant Cakir did on various experimental drugs and other projects that Defendant Cakir worked on in one of BCH’s laboratories, with a market value of well in excess of seventy-five thousand dollars. In addition, BCH believes and therefore alleges that the Laptop Data includes plans by Defendant Cakir to steal the Laptop Data for sale to or use by third parties unknown - which explains why he has steadfastly refused to provide the Laptop Data to the Hospital even after the Hospital offered to appoint an independent third party to remove anything of a personal nature.
Attachment | Size |
---|---|
![]() | 42.55 KB |
![]() | 563.3 KB |
Ad:
Comments
Tit for tat
Tit for tat
Harvard strikes again
Typical
The Children's lab must have
The Children's lab must have a very unsophisticated technology infrastructure if the only place the data existed was the laptop. They have a much bigger problem than this dude.
I don't think they're alleging he left with the only copy
But rather that he shouldn't have left with a copy of the data at all.