On a rainy morning at the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Md., last fall, Duke University biochemist Homme Hellinga took the stage to sum up what he had been doing over the last 5 years with the $2.5 million Pioneer award he received in 2004. Unlike other NIH grants that require a strict game plan with concrete goals, the Pioneer award is a kind of no-strings-attached slush fund to encourage “high-risk, high-impact research.” Hellinga and his cohort had come to report on their findings and experiences.
Hellinga’s grey waves of hair encircle a cherubic face just beginning to show its age. As many in the audience were no doubt aware, he was currently the subject of a Duke investigation into research misconduct after two pioneering papers on computational enzyme design were retracted in 2008. But as he began speaking that Friday, he knew another controversy was about to ...
