Harvard Turns to Turkish Government to Replace U.S. Funds

Plus, New York Times columnist says New York Times news story is garbage

An anti-Israel protest near the Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health campuses in Boston’s Longwood neighborhood, January 6, 2025. Photo: The Editors.

“Private equity firm will finance Harvard research lab,” was the headline that Stat put over its June 16 report, one that set the tone for future coverage of that news.

Better, more skeptical coverage, like an otherwise excellent and groundbreaking piece in Retraction Watch, “Harvard researcher’s work faces scrutiny after private equity deal,” also bought into the “private equity” framing. The Retraction Watch piece pointed to two published corrections and additional “issues with statistical analyses” in the scientific work of Gökhan Hotamışlıgil, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health whose lab got the funding.

(The dean for communications and strategic initiatives at Harvard Chan School, Stephanie Simon, who wrote about the deal for the school of public health’s website and is listed as a contact on the press release about the deal, is a former editor at Stat. She didn’t respond to two emails from me seeking comment.)

But precisely how “private,” really, is the “private” equity deal, which was announced as “nearly $39 million over 10 years” for work related to “obesity and age-related diseases”?