Flim-Flam Man Fired After Faking Federally Funded HIV Cure

An Iowa State University assistant professor resigned after admitting he falsely claimed rabbit blood could be turned into a vaccine for the AIDS virus. According to the UK Daily Mail Dr. Dong-Pyou Han spiked a clinical test sample with healthy human blood to make it appear that the rabbit serum produced disease-fighting antibodies.

James Bradac, who helps oversee AIDS vaccine grants for the National Institutes of Health, said that the bogus findings helped Han's team secure $19 million in research grants. Han allegedly took the human blood from people whose bodies had produced antibodies to HIV, making it appear that the vaccine was spurring the rabbits to build defenses against the disease.

"This positive result was striking, and it caught everybody's attention," Bradac said, adding, "It's difficult to pull something like this off and not be detected. This went on for several years and wasn't detected until January 2013."

But when reports in scientific journals could not be duplicated, other researchers began to call foul. The NIH uncovered the scam when it checked the rabbit serum at a lab and found the human antibodies. Bradac said it was the worst case of research fraud he had seen in all his years with the NIH.

Han resigned from his university post as an assistant professor of biomedical studies in October, and has agreed on Dec. 23, 2013, not to seek government contracts for three years, nor to serve in any "advisory capacity" to the U.S. Public Health Service.

But as of yet, the federal government has not asked the university to repay the money, which Bradac said would be a highly unusual move. Approximately $4M of the funds remains unused.

Han was part of Dr. Michael Cho's research team originally transferred from Case Western Reserve University of Ohio. Cho has not been implicated in the fraud case, and has vowed to continue the vaccine research despite the setbacks caused by Han's fraudulent actions.