AIDS-vaccine fraud sentence upheld for ex-ISU scientist

A former Iowa State University scientist who admitted faking AIDS-vaccine research has failed to have his prison sentence reduced.

Dong-Pyou Han was sentenced last August to serve four years and nine months in federal prison for defrauding the government out of millions of dollars in research money. Han admitted that he faked results to make it look like a vaccine was protecting rabbits against the virus that causes AIDS.

An appeals court this week rejected his public defender’s request for a lesser sentence, as first reported by the national academic blog "Retraction Watch." The case has drawn wide attention, because it is rare for anyone to face prison for academic fraud.

Defense lawyer John Messina contended that the sentence on the two felony charges was unreasonable.

“Dr. Han obtained little benefit from his false statements,” Messina wrote to the appeals court in September. “At most, he received the continuation of his salary and the temporary prestige of being part of promising research.”

Messina also said the court should have taken into account Han’s personal history. The lawyer wrote that the scientist grew up in South Korea as the oldest child of a mother with a gambling problem, and that he paid his own way through college and worked his way up in the scientific world. He had no criminal history more serious than a seat belt violation, the lawyer wrote, and he took full responsibility for his misdeeds.

However, the sentence imposed by U.S. District Judge James Gritzner was at the low end of standard guidelines. The appeals court upheld the sentence in a short filing this week. “We have reviewed the record independently … and we find no non-frivolous issues for appeal,” a panel of three appeals judges wrote.

Han resigned from ISU in 2013, after other researchers determined he had mixed human blood products into blood samples from rabbits that had been treated with the experimental AIDS vaccine. The results made it appear that the vaccine was protecting the rabbits against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The purported success drew millions more dollars to his ISU team from the National Institutes of Health. No one else was implicated in the fraud. ISU has said Han's supervisor, Biomedical Sciences Professor Michael Cho, helped uncover it.

According to a federal website, Han. 58, has started serving his sentence at a privately run prison in Pennsylvania. He also was ordered to repay $7.2 million to the National Institutes of Health, though it's unclear how much of that can be collected from a man poor enough to qualify for a public defender. Court documents indicate Han likely will be deported to South Korea after prison.

As a result of the fraud, ISU had to repay $496,000 to the federal government. Federal officials also canceled $1.4 million in grants that had not yet been paid.