Court to researcher: Juries not as dumb as you think

A federal appeals court yesterday upheld a jury verdict that two local hospitals and their researchers did not commit fraud in winning $12 million in federal grants to study Alzheimer's disease.

Kenneth Jones, a statistician initially involved in the study, had filed a whistleblower suit against Mass. General and Brigham and Women's hospitals and two doctors, alleging they changed data from an initial study to make a better case for the federal grant to look at whether MRI measurements of physical changes in parts of the brain might presage Alzheimer's disease.

After a federal jury ruled in favor of the researchers and the hospitals, Jones appealed, in part on the theory that the evidence was so clear that he was right that the judge in the case should have overruled the jury.

Wrong, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston said. The appeals court said its review of the case showed the jury did nothing wrong in concluding that what Jones saw as evidence manipulation was, in fact, a researcher reviewing and refining his initial results based on the growing knowledge he had gained of measuring one small part of the brain.

Jones has had the opportunity to present his claims in court before a jury. That jury ultimately concluded that Killiany did not intentionally falsify scientific data and that the application's statement that the study used blinded, reliable methods was not false.