Murray recalled that Klausner had given a speech last May at Harvard Medical School, sponsored by HIGH, where he “laid out a vision of where the foundation was heading.”
“There was no suggestion at the time that he would resign,” Murray said of Klausner.
Murray said he did not know the details of the allegations against Klausner, and added that the investigation has “not received much attention in the global health community at all.”
But he said he thought it was unlikely that a director at NCI could have influenced the decision to give a grant to Harvard, due to the peer review process in which non-NCI members of the independent research community evaluate the grant proposals.
“There’s really no way that research that doesn’t meet the standards of the field can be financed,” Murray said.
—Staff writer Tina Wang can be reached at tinawang@fas.harvard.edu.