Is Trump Taking Lessons From Pisters?
By
Leonard Zwelling
By definition, MD Anderson is a monarchy. There is no congress. There are no courts. The president’s power is unchecked and singularly unquestioned.
I should know. I questioned the power of an MD Anderson president on a regular basis. It eventually got me fired. You see I was supposed to be the overseer of MD Anderson’s adherence to federal research regulations (human subjects research, animal care and use, biosafety) along with policies on conflict of interest and research misconduct. The president I served had his own ideas about conflicts of interest and human subjects research. His ideas about the latter did not comply with the Federal Code of Regulations. We had the debate about this for years. Until I was gone. Then he was gone. Then things got worse at Anderson.
To make a long story short, if, as MD Anderson president, you neither lose money, nor commit a crime, nor break one of the Ten Commandments, nor create an uproar with the faculty, nor ignore the UT Chancellor, you will probably survive.
In other words, if you don’t screw up, you can be MD Anderson king for a long time and it’s good to be king. I do believe that Dr. Pisters has learned from his predecessors and is likely to have a good long run atop the Anderson piranha-filled food pyramid by keeping his low profile, ignoring the faculty, and hiring people who will never challenge him as I did John Mendelsohn.
I think Mr. Trump would like to do the very same thing in Washington. The equivalent of the MD Anderson faculty at the federal level seems to be Congress. Mr. Trump has neutered Congress with the threat of primary challenges and of losing his favor in the majority of GOP members. Dr. Pisters has done it with the threat of dismissal for a lack of professionalism that has been underwritten by the Texas Legislature.
Undoubtedly, the current Supreme Court (the Board of Regents equivalent) will give Mr. Trump everything that he wants. If that Court goes along with the Trump proposal to limit birth right citizenship in direct contravention of the Fourteenth Amendment, then you will know that all the rest of the lower court rulings against Mr. Trump will be reversed.
Finally, there’s the Executive Branch of the federal government which Mr. Trump is paring back with the help of the government expert Elon Musk. Dr. Pisters has not had to pare back his executive branch, the 25,000 or so employees who are not faculty. But he might very soon. If the indirect cost rate on federal grants really drops to something between 15 and 25%, Dr. Pisters will either have to find cash to make up the difference, decrease the amount of research being done, or decrease his overhead, most of which is that 25,000 people. He too may have to trim his executive branch. Maybe Mr. Musk will come to Texas. Oh wait, Space-X is here.
Either way, Mr. Trump is working hard and effectively to turn the federal government into a mirror-image of MD Anderson. Mr. Trump wants to be king.
With his soon anticipated coronation, Mr. Trump, has begun the process of carving up the world with his fellow despots in China and Russia. To go to Saudi Arabia for the onset of peace talks with Russia about Ukraine without the participation of Ukraine looks really bad and is, at best, rude. As someone said on TV today, “with peace talks, if you are not at the table, you are on the table.”
I understand that most of Mr. Trump’s supporters are very satisfied with the way things are going in the first month of his second term. I believe that he has correctly identified the problems he needs to address. He believes that there are simple solutions for these problems—in Gaza, in Ukraine, and at home. It was also said by H. L. Mencken that “for every complex problem there’s a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”
I believe that both Mr. Trump and Dr. Pisters might want to heed that advice.
4 thoughts on “Is Trump Taking Lessons From Pisters?”
President Pisters is above the law. This is a man who talks about integrity and transparency all the time. His people work for a boss who, at best, has a compromised attitude about his own academic integrity. It appears they are only there to serve him blindly without questioning reason. This president may not have ever written an original paper given the vast amount of plagiarism in his review articles. He wrote one review and kept copying from it.
Here is the list of papers from Dr. Pisters with clear evidence of plagiarism:
1 Pisters P et al. Critical Reviews in Clinical Laboratory Sciences 1993
25% plagiarism with:
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev.nu.10.070190.000543 1990
2 Porter et al. Cost-effectiveness of pulmonary resection and systemic chemotherapy in the management of metastatic soft tissue sarcoma: A combined analysis from the University of Texas M. D. Anderson and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centers. The Journal of Thoracic Surgery May 2004
12% plagiarism with:
https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cncr.10184 2002
3 P.W.T. (2008). Soft Tissue Sarcoma. In: Norton, J.A., et al. Surgery. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-68113-9_99 21% (13+8) Pisters, P.W. (2003). Soft Tissue Sarcoma. In: Essential Practice of Surgery. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-22744-X_55 2003
8% plagiarism with:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02303867 1998
4 Scaife CL, Pisters PW. Combined-modality treatment of localized soft tissue sarcomas of the extremities. Surg Oncol Clin N Am. 2003 Apr;12(2):355-68. doi: 10.1016/s1055-3207(03)00003-6. PMID: 12916459.
35% plagiarism with:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02303867 1998
5 Tseng JF, Ballo MT, Langstein HN, Wayne JD, Cormier JN, Hunt KK, Feig BW, Yasko AW, Lewis VO, Lin PP, Cannon CP, Zagars GK, Pollock RE, Pisters PW. The effect of preoperative radiotherapy and reconstructive surgery on wound complications after resection of extremity soft-tissue sarcomas. Ann Surg Oncol. 2006 Sep;13(9):1209-15. doi: 10.1245/s10434-006-9028-6. Epub 2006 Sep 3. PMID: 16952046.
8% plagiarism with:
https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO.1999.17.9.2772 1999
6 Ahmad SA, Patel SR, Ballo MT, Baker TP, Yasko AW, Wang X, Feig BW, Hunt KK, Lin PP, Weber KL, Chen LL, Zagars GK, Pollock RE, Benjamin RS, Pisters PW. Extraosseous osteosarcoma: response to treatment and long-term outcome. J Clin Oncol. 2002 Jan 15;20(2):521-7. doi: 10.1200/JCO.2002.20.2.521. PMID: 11786582.
11% plagiarism with:
Fleming JB, Berman RS, Cheng SC, Chen NP, Hunt KK, Feig BW, Respondek PM, Yasko AW, Pollack A, Patel SR, Burgess MA, Papadopoulos NE, Plager C, Zagars G, Benjamin RS, Pollock RE, Pisters PW. Long-term outcome of patients with American Joint Committee on Cancer stage IIB extremity soft tissue sarcomas. J Clin Oncol. 1999 Sep;17(9):2772-80. doi: 10.1200/JCO.1999.17.9.2772. PMID: 10561352.
7 Raut CP, Pisters PW. Retroperitoneal sarcomas: Combined-modality treatment approaches. J Surg Oncol. 2006 Jul 1;94(1):81-7. doi: 10.1002/jso.20543. PMID: 16788949.
23% plagiarism with:
https://journals.lww.com/co-oncology/abstract/2002/07000/retroperitoneal_sarcomas__combined_modality.6.aspx
8 Pisters, P.W.T., O’Sullivan, B. and Pollock, R.E. (2014). Soft Tissue Sarcoma. In TNM Online (eds L.H. Sobin, M.K. Gospodarowicz, B. O’Sullivan, L.H. Sobin, D.E. Henson and R.V.P. Hutter). https://doi.org/10.1002/0471463736.tnmp27
35% plagiarism with:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053429699800253 Peter W.T. Pisters, Raphael E. Pollock, Staging and prognostic factors in soft tissue sarcoma,Seminars in Radiation Oncology, Volume 9, Issue 4,1999,Pages 307-314, ISSN 1053-4296,
https://doi.org/10.1016/S1053-4296(99)80025-3
9 Cormier, J.N., Langstein, H.N., Pisters, P.W.T. (2004). Preoperative therapy for soft tissue sarcoma. In: Verweij, J., Pinedo, H.M. (eds) Targeting Treatment of Soft Tissue Sarcomas. Cancer Treatment and Research, vol 120. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-7856-0_3
22% plagiarism with:
Cormier, J.N. and Pollock, R.E. (2004), Soft Tissue Sarcomas†. CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, 54: 94-109. https://doi.org/10.3322/canjclin.54.2.94
10 Treatment of localized soft-tissue sarcoma: Lessons learned. Pisters, Peter W. T. ONCOLOGYVolume 21, Issue 6, Pages 731 – 735May 2007
31% plagiarism with:
Evidence-Based Recommendations for Local Therapy for Soft Tissue Sarcomas. Peter W.T. Pisters, Brian O’Sullivan, and Robert G. Maki. 2007
11 “Preoperative Paclitaxel and Concurrent Rapid-Fractionation Radiation for Resectable Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma: Toxicities, Histologic Response Rates, and Event-Free Outcome. By Peter W.T. Pisters, Robert A. Wolff, Nora A. Janjan, Karen R. Cleary, Chusilp Charnsangavej, Christopher N. Crane, Renato Lenzi, J. Nicolas Vauthey, Jeffrey E. Lee, James L. Abbruzzese, and Douglas B. Evans. Journal of Clinical Oncology, Vol 20, No 10 (May 15), 2002: pp 2537-2544 2537
DOI: 10.1200/JCO.2002.11.064”
21% plagiarism with:
Rapid-fractionation preoperative chemoradiation, pancreaticoduodenectomy, and intraoperative radiation therapy for resectable pancreatic adenocarcinoma. P W Pisters, J L Abbruzzese, N A Janjan, K R Cleary, C Charnsangavej, M S Goswitz, T A Rich, I Raijman, R A Wolff, R Lenzi, J E Lee, and D B Evans. JCO December 1998
12 Pisters PW, O’Sullivan B. Retroperitoneal sarcomas: combined modality treatment approaches. Curr Opin Oncol. 2002 Jul;14(4):400-5. doi: 10.1097/00001622-200207000-00006. PMID: 12130924.
9% plagiarism with:
Pisters, P.W.T., Ballo, M.T. & Patel, S.R. Preoperative chemoradiation treatment strategies for localized sarcoma. Annals of Surgical Oncology 9, 535–542 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02573888
This is quite a list. Can you tell me how these plagiarism numbers were arrived at and why this breach of research integrity has not been reported to the Research Integrity Officer?
They were notified. Too bad Compliance and Legal report to the President…
To whom do you refer?