John Dingell

I remember John Dingell from my days writing for The Tech, the campus newspaper at M.I.T. He had a reputation as a bully, who liked to hold hearings and conduct investigations on fraud and waste in science to grandstand. The two I remember best ended up being busts as far as actually uncovering waste or fraud--audits of funding by research universities and a fraud case involving a researcher in David Baltimore's lab where the all charges were eventually dismissed.

The Tech, Feb. 7, 1992

The government -- particularly Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), chairman of the Oversight andInvestigations Subcommittee -- tried to publicly embarrass MIT and other universities for alleged misuses of funds, even before formal evidence was presented before the committee.

The Tech, June 6, 1997

What had originally been a matter of Imanishi-Kari's questionable research data quickly swelled into a thorny and divisive debate over the validity of scientific research.

Baltimore derided the controversy as a witch hunt and believed that some people, like U.S. Representative John Dingell (D-Mich.), were using it unreasonably to call into question government money spent on funding research.