The Jewel of Memorial

I, time to time, watch the National on CBC and tonight I turned it on and what I saw and heard made me so agitated, nervous and also disappointed. It's the story about an East Indian (again f**king East Indians!) researcher in Memorial University of New Foundland in St. John's and his fraudulent studies and publishes: Dr. Ranjit Kumar Chandra. This is the abstract of what I saw in the first part:

Newfoundland is one of Canada’s Atlantic provinces which considers also the poorest province of the country. It’s also the last province which joined the confederation in 1949, considering that Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia joined together in 1867 to create the new country of Canada. So it was 82 years after confederation when Newfoundland joined the other provinces. Nunavut was part of Northwest Territories and then got separated and appeared as the last province/territory in 1999. Now some of them claim independence, including Quebec which lost a referendum in 1995 and recently Alberta which is sick and tired of giving to the Federal Government so much. Fortunately it hasn't happened yet and I hope it never happens. I'll get to that later in a complete and separate post. Now I get back to Newfoundland and Chandra's story.

Fishery was the most important industry in that part of Canada at the beginning but as the number of immigrants grew, the number of fishes fell down and that made life difficult for inhabitants of NF who are mostly from Irish origin. Then there’s tourism in there but again it’s not as attractive as Canada’s landmarks like Niagara Falls, CN Tower, Banff or else. Hence most of Newfoundlanders are internal immigrants. Many of them work as roughneck in oil industry of Alberta, up in the north, mostly in Fort McMurray. Other are spread all over the country, mostly do not have education and do labour job.

The above introduction leads us to the truth that Memorial University of Newfoundland, where fake Dr. Chandra used to teach and do his studies can not be a number one academic place for the geniuses in Canada compare to other schools such as University of Toronto, University of Waterloo, University of Alberta and finally University of Calgary. Simply put the university knew from the beginning what’s going on with fake Dr. Chandra but they didn’t want to lose their jewel(!) as that precious (but forged!) masterpiece could attract students and researchers from around the country and world to St. John’s and that boosts the economy of the province.

His fraudulent studies were revealed when an assistant nurse of him who was supposed to collect data of allergic babies in the small town of St. John’s with a estimated population of 99,100 in 2001, found out that the study has been done, released and published in an important medical journal before she even reaches the number of data they needed for that type of research! She, after considerable thoughts decided to act as a whistleblower.

The other thing happened and made everyone (well not everybody actually!) is he did one same study for 2 or different companies which uses the same formula for their product. Two of them were proved by Chandra and the last one was not. When he was asked why he didn’t prove their product while all three companies have almost the same product in the market he said: You didn’t give me enough money to prove yours as well!

He was most of the time on trip. Seems like he didn’t like St. John’s very much! regardless of the fact that, it'swhere he earned almost $2 million which has never been revealed until his wife filed divorce. He was out of the country as many almsot 120 days of year and still was able to manage and publish as many as 11 studies in a year! Memorial decided to investigate and after a long period of three months they concluded that the studies are made up. But the university didn’t discipline him because of few reasons including what has mentioned above: The special situation of St. John’s and NF. Also they say that they’re afraid of being sued by Chandra because he’s so famous that no one even imagine that he make up studies and researches to make money. It’s claimed that he was Nobel Prize nominee two times. So who dares say something against him? Even the nurse got in to trouble and I don’t know how she managed to escape! The university also adds that because that was not something could endanger human life, they didn’t take any action against the owner of almost 120 different bank accounts all around the world who also runs his multivitamin online business and now spends most of his free time in Swiss. Although what university might have done was not more than firing him while he resigned himself in 2002 right after suspicion raised.