A professor at the University of Pittsburgh is suing the institution and two administrators, alleging they discriminated against him because he is Black.
The researcher, Moses Bility, an assistant professor of infectious diseases and microbiology in the university’s School of Public Health, alleges the school’s response to a 2020 paper he published and later withdrew that proposed jade amulets may prevent COVID-19 was discriminatory.
He also claims the school discriminated against him by blocking him from transferring his lab to the Pitt-affiliated Hillman Cancer Center, and that one of the named administrators plagiarized his COVID-19 paper, among other allegedly discriminatory acts. Bility says the school denied his application for tenure in June as retaliation for his complaints of discrimination.
Bility is seeking lost wages, compensatory and punitive damages, and attorney’s fees. His complaint states:
As a result of all the conduct of Defendants as set forth above, Dr. Bility has suffered embarrassment, substantial mental anguish and emotional distress, and loss of wages and potential earnings. The discrimination has affected his family, including his wife and children, who have been deprived of receiving his best care and attention due to him coping with all Defendants’ discriminatory conduct.
Pitt and the two administrators, Donald Burke and Maureen Lictveld, the former and current deans of the school of public health, respectively, have filed a motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that Bility “alleges no facts actually linking perceived wrongs to either his race or his complaints of discrimination.”
Jeremy Engle, a lawyer at the Pittsburgh firm Marcus & Shapira, who is representing the defendants, declined to comment. (The firm is unrelated to Retraction Watch co-founder Adam Marcus.)
Bility’s lawyer, Steven O’Hanlon of the firm O’Hanlon Schwartz, told us:
The motion to dismiss is meritless given the extensively detailed amended complaint.
The article that proposed jade amulets may prevent COVID-19, “Can Traditional Chinese Medicine provide insights into controlling the COVID-19 pandemic: Serpentinization-induced lithospheric long-wavelength magnetic anomalies in Proterozoic bedrocks in a weakened geomagnetic field mediate the aberrant transformation of biogenic molecules in COVID-19 via magnetic catalysis, was published as an “article in press” in Science of the Total Environment, an Elsevier title, in October 2020.
Following critique online, the authors of the paper withdrew it, and Bility planned to replace the paper with a new version on which he would be the sole author. (In the process of our previous reporting on the article, Bility accused Retraction Watch of racism.)
Bility told us that he had presented the work at several conferences this year and resubmitted an updated version of the manuscript to Science of the Total Environment a few months ago. However, the journal rejected it as “not well aligned with the aims and scope of this environmental science journal,” according to the decision letter Bility shared with us.
He told us:
I believe that Science of the Total Environment was afraid to review the work due to the previous backlash against the journal when the work was reviewed and published in 2020. I will be submitting my work to another journal in the coming months.
An updated version of the paper Bility shared with us no longer mentions traditional Chinese medicine in the title or jade amulets in the body of the text.
In his complaint, Bility alleges that he withdrew the paper after receiving “violent threats, racial abuse and harassing actions.”
Some of the alleged harassment involved vandalism. The name tag on Bility’s office wall was torn down multiple times, he says. Later, in the fall of 2021, the complaint says that someone broke into his office:
the ceiling was tempered [sic] with; Dr. Bility believed that electronic recoding [sic] devices were placed in the ceiling.
Bility claims he also received pressure from others at Pitt. Jean Nachega, an associate professor in the school of public health whom Bility listed as last author on the paper, told Bility that Nachega’s “research funding was threatened to be withheld if the article was not withdrawn,” according to the complaint. School officials demanded Bility’s chair investigate him and his research.
When the findings of the investigation – that Bility “did not violate any academic integrity standard” – were presented at a departmental town hall meeting over Zoom, “students in Defendant Pitt’s School of Public Health called Dr. Bility derogatory names, such as stupid, retarded, unintelligent, etc.,” he alleges. Bility also received two emails “from anonymous individuals who Dr. Bility assumes came from the Defendant Pitt community” that included racial slurs.
In the fall of 2020, Bility says he received a verbal offer to move his research lab to the Hillman Cancer Center, which is also affiliated with Pitt, but he alleges the move was blocked on account of the withdrawn paper:
On December 21, 2020, Dr. Bility was informed (via a zoom call) by Dr. Robert Ferris, the Director of the Hillman Cancer Center and the Associate Vice Chancellor for Cancer Research, Defendant Pitt Health Sciences, that he was instructed by an unnamed powerful individual in the Defendant Pitt Health Sciences not to allow Dr. Bility to move to the center. Dr. Ferris offered Dr. Bility an opportunity that if he apologized for engaging in the research in question, the powerful individual in the Defendant Pitt Health Sciences might reconsider the decision to block the transfer; Dr. Bility refused to apologize.
Bility also alleges that, in 2021, Burke, who had retired from his role as dean that January, published a preprint that plagiarized “the assumptions, findings, and prediction framework” of the withdrawn Science of the Total Environment article. (Burke, Bility alleges, had earlier discouraged him from pursuing the line of research and presenting his work at a school workshop in 2019.)
Bility submitted a formal complaint to the university, which an inquiry panel found did not warrant a formal investigation. The school closed the matter in July 2022. Bility alleges the inquiry panel was biased against him.
In August of 2021, Bility alleges that Lichtveld, the current dean of the public health school, emailed him to relay requests from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that he remove two grant funding acknowledgments from a Scientific Reports article he had published in 2020.
A correction in September 2021 removed one of the grants, but Bility was “very concerned” about the request to remove the other, from the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), according to the complaint, and doubted that NIH had indeed asked for it. He alleges:
Defendant Lichtveld was aware of the legal consequences Dr. Bility would have faced had he violated Public Law 101-166, Section 511, (also known as the Steven’s Amendment), which requires the acknowledgement of NIH (U.S. Government) funding in research articles. Defendant Lichtveld was aware of the legal consequences Dr. Bility would have faced had he provided false information to the NIH to alter the federal records for his grant to reconcile removing the acknowledgement. Defendant Lichtveld only targeted Dr. Bility, who is Black
Pitt and Lichtveld’s motion to dismiss called these allegations “outlandish.”
Bility’s complaint details other behavior by Lichtveld he alleges created a “hostile work environment,” which he attributes to “the belief that a Black scientist should not engage in scholarly activities that challenge the scientific paradigm established by non-Black scientists,” namely, his research “investigating the weakening geomagnetic field, changes in Earth’s environment/hydroclimate, and human health.”
O’Hanlon, Bility’s lawyer, filed a motion for the judge assigned to the case, Marilyn J. Horan, to recuse herself on the grounds that she is a member of the University of Pittsburgh Law School Board of Governors. The defendants opposed the motion and Horan denied it, writing that the volunteer role “will have no actual or apparent impact in this case.”
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An amulet? As my dog would say.. woa. But let us see the outcome
What a crazy story. I can’t relate to any of it. Smells funky.
Yeah, this guy’s complaint is completely groundless. Turns out medical institutions with any degree of sense don’t like it when prospective employees spew nonsense about jade amulets curing disease. Who knew?
The geomagnetic field activity is seasonal, it has a semi-annual oscillation (a 6-month wavelength). The peak geomagnetic activities are in the equinoctial period, around April in the Spring, and around October in the Fall. The geomagnetic field protects Earth from cosmic radiation, including spin polarized muons, which can eject spin polarized electrons from magnetite (iron oxide). Terrestrial water storage dynamics drives serpentinization (produces magnetite) and it has geographic clusters that co-localized with the major drainage basins.
Lastly, the NOAA image is a CC0 made by the US Government. You can’t plagiarize CC0 material because it was made for the public domain. You can edit it, publish as it is or do whatever you want.
The more you know, the more you understand.
CC0 is about copyright. Indeed, CC0 materials may be reused, edited, etc. without violating copyright. But presenting materials created by others without attribution and thus implying they are one’s own work is considered plagiarism. Copyright is a separate matter.
You clearly didn’t read the article. I acknowledge that the figure was edited from a NOAA image; I’m sure that’s called attributing credit. Here is the exact verbatim text from the original article, which is included in my updated manuscript.
Acknowledgments
Other contributions
The graphical abstract was constructed via modifying a publically available image created by the U.S. Government, The National Oceanic, and Atmospheric Administration. We also thank the creators/authors
of the maps, datasets, databases used in this publication.
Re “You clearly didn’t read the article.” That is correct. I can’t find the original article to read. My comment was responding to the remark that materials in the public domain cannot be plagiarized.
Your arguments and “evidence” are just word salad, conveniently crossing enough disciplines that no one expert can dispute all the facts without doing a lot of reading. Whether you honestly believe you’re contributing or if it is malicious I’m not sure. But either way it is embarrassing to see in a reputable journal.
So…if you produce a totally unscientific paper and someone calls you on it you are a racist? Got it.
Sure, a spin chemistry based-mechanism linking geochemistry to biology is unscientific; please explain how this PNAS paper got published in 2020, https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2204765119.
Sure, arguing weakening geomagnetic field may promote large-scale deaths in humans and that indigenous practices may have health protection effects is unscientific, please explain how this Science paper got published in 2021, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abb8677
Just because some of the many topics your paper tries to summon in order to explain the jade amulet efficacy have been explored before (in a scientific manner) doesn’t mean your document is scientific. That’s like saying no COVID paper could have ever been unscientific (and retracted) because such papers were dealing with a topic and techniques that had been researched and used before. You published a paper that didn’t hold its water, otherwise it would have been successfully published like the examples you are giving. You used other researcher’s names without permission, you yourself withdrew your paper and provided people from retraction watch with a new version that doesn’t mention amulets anymore…. why? You must be responsible for your actions, not everybody who disagrees with you is trying to attack you and pretending that every scientist or institution that tries to hold you accountable is automatically racist and discriminatory discredits the legitimate battles minorities have to overcome in order to put out QUALITY research. Don’t be the Smollett of science, do better. Good luck with your upcoming legal endeavors
You forgot that my work was peer-reviewed and published, and I withdrew it after my students and colleagues (and myself) were threatened. I presented my work at the American Physical Society (APS)-March Meeting; the abstract was reviewed and accepted; apparently that doesn’t count. Did you even read the complaint? Did you even read the new manuscript; it still references the use of jade by the Neolithic Jade cultures in Europe and Asia.
It is mentioned that your article “was published as an article in press in Science of the Total Environment, an Elsevier title, in October 2020.” This is a specialized science blog, so I believe readers will understand that this is a peer reviewed publication. Most Elsevier journals are.
Hello Moses,
Your paper was discovered by a student on one of the classes we are in. It’s about research methods. I was wondering if you could guide me to a link or some repository where I could find your paper. Our teacher is interested in it as well.
Would be interesting to know on which grounds he got his faculty appointment, to begin with. Hope he found a good amulet to win his case.
Science, like our constitutional democracy, is based on the Rule of Law; it is not based on whether you like an idea or if it is in line with what others think. In fact, there are numerous instances where the scientific community has been wrong in their understanding of a phenomenon; thus, we have a rules base system to examine and adjudicate matters regarding new ideas and knowledge, even when those new ideas and knowledge clashes with the current dominant ideas and knowledge.
The scientific method for a layperson per Khan Academy; “At the core of biology and other sciences lies a problem-solving approach called the scientific method. The scientific method has five basic steps, plus one feedback step:” Below, I explain my work (see the link at “An updated version” in the Retractionwatch article above) in the context of the scientific method.
Step #1: Make an observation:
Observation #1: For many years, scientists have reported that the building blocks of life on Earth, such as Animo acids and sugars, are either left-handed or right-handed molecules; they are not both, despite the fact both left- and right-handed molecules are produced in chemical reactions performed in the laboratory. This is called biomolecular chiral symmetry breaking and homochiral life. Furthermore, most scientists believe that life on Earth was produce by a geologic process called serpentinization (M J Russell 1, A J Hall, W Martin, 2010, Geobiology); scientists have observed many of the ingredients required for producing life can be made from the serpentinization process, this also includes iron (in the form of iron oxide-magnetite, which can become magnetic).
Observation #2: For many years, scientists have reported that the geomagnetic field protects life on Earth (including humans) from cosmic radiation, and several scientists have reported that when the geomagnetic field weakens, they have observed large number of deaths, including in human populations (J. E. T. Channell, et al, 2019, Reviews of Geophysics; Alan Cooper et al, 2021, Science). Observation #3: Over many decades, scientists have reported that magnetic field can mediate chemical reactions by controlling the magnetic properties of the electrons in molecules, this is called spin-controlled reactions, which is a major part of a sub-discipline of chemistry called spin chemistry.
Step #2: Ask a question:
Question #1: Can biomolecular chiral symmetry breaking and homochiral life occur right there in the proposed serpentinization-driven hydrothermal mound in the origin of life hypothesis proposed over 30 years ago by Dr. Michael Russell at NASA.
Question #2: Is life on Earth, including large-scale deaths in the biosphere (includes humans) modulated across geologic periods via the very same serpentinization process that is hypothesized to have produced homochiral life.
Question #3: At the very beginning of the virology discipline, scientists proposed that viruses emerged in the biosphere via a “progressive hypothesis”. Scientists proposed that bits of DNA/RNA in a normal cell are transformed into a virus, however, scientists are still searching for a suitable mechanism for that process. I ask a simple question, can spin-controlled reactions driven by serpentinization and modulated by spin-polarized muons (cosmic radiation) in a weak geomagnetic field alter the bits of DNA/RNA of endogenous viruses in a normal cell to produce a virus. Note that DNA/RNA of endogenous viruses are an open scientific mystery; they are important in many biological processes, including reproduction. I believe that the DNA/RNA of endogenous viruses are normal genes, and they are not genes from some long dead ancient viruses that were co-opted by cells.
Step #4: Form a hypothesis, or testable explanation:
Hypothesis: Can the magnetite (iron oxide; a magnetic mineral) produced in the well-accepted serpentinization-driven origin of life hypothesis mediate biomolecular chiral symmetry breaking and modulate homochiral life across geologic periods during weakening in the geomagnetic field and associated increased cosmic radiation (specifically, spin-polarized muons).
Step #5: Make a prediction based on the hypothesis and Test the prediction:
Prediction #1 and Test #1: Magnetized magnetite (magnets) will be able to mediate spin-controlled reactions involving biological molecules in the laboratory and produce excess of either right or left-handed molecules depending on the magnetic field. This phenomenon has been demonstrated in many labs and it is called the “chiral-induced spin selectivity” phenomenon.
Prediction #2 and Test #2: Other scientists have already reported that analysis of the geologic records demonstrates that during periods of weakening in the geomagnetic field many deaths occurred in the biosphere (J. E. T. Channell, et al, 2019, Reviews of Geophysics; Alan Cooper et al, 2021, Science). I predicted that analysis of the most recent weakening in the geomagnetic field, the Mid-Holocene geomagnetic field minimum (around 6000 years ago) will show large number of deaths in humans. Indeed, I tested this prediction and show that the Mid-Holocene geomagnetic field minimum is associated with the large number of deaths in humans, this event is called the Neolithic Die-offs, and it predominately affected males. Interestingly, at the onset of the weakening in the geomagnetic field, people in Europe and Asia began mining and using derivatives from the serpentinization process called Jade (Nephrite and Jadeite). These Jade materials were highly prized in Neolithic European societies (the Alpine Jade Culture) and in Neolithic Asian societies. The Europeans abandoned the Alpine Jade culture after the geomagnetic field stabilized and regained strength, however, Asian culture have maintained a reverence for Jade.
Prediction #3 and Test #3: I predicted in 2019 that per my modified “progressive hypothesis of the origin of viruses” that virus diseases associated with large-scale deaths will emerge due to the current weakening in the geomagnetic field; albeit the virus can be transmitted, and vaccines and drugs can block the growth and spread of the transmission of the virus(es). This emerging viral disease will have a recurring spatiotemporal dynamic that is synchronous with the seasonality of the geomagnetic field activity, which controls cosmic radiation levels on Earth. This emerging viral disease will also have a recurring spatiotemporal dynamic that is synchronous with the seasonality of water dynamics of Earth, which controls the serpentinization process that produces magnetite (iron oxide with magnetic properties). I predicted that COVID-19, an emerging viral disease may have been mediated by the weakening geomagnetic field and spin-controlled reactions (magnetic catalysis). Indeed, Enard et al., 2021, Curr. Biol. provided evidence that a COVID-19-like epidemic ended in Asia right at the end of the end of the Neolithic die-off. I tested this hypothesis, by showing that COVID-19 deaths in humans started in early 2020, at the beginning of Solar Cycle 25 (the current solar cycle), which controls the geomagnetic activity for this decade. I also show that COVID-19 deaths peak in the Spring (around April) and in the Fall (around October), as is expected because the geomagnetic field activity peaks around those months. The geomagnetic field seasonal activity has a well-documented 6-month wavelength (we observe it as the aurora borealis). I also show that COVID-19 cases/deaths will be severe for about 2 years, then subside, and cases/deaths will resume after about 2 years; this is due to the quasi-biennial oscillation of the geomagnetic field. Recurring geomagnetic field activity has a 6-month wavelength within a year, and ~2.2-year wavelength between years. I show that more COVID-19 deaths per population will occur in the Americas and Europe, which has relatively more weakening in the geomagnetic field compared to the other continents (also refer to as tectonic plates). I also show animals in my colony exhibit a lung disease similar to COVID-19 late in 2019, even though they were not infected.
Iterate: I concurred with Alan Cooper et al, 2021, Science, which propose that human cultures that emerged during weakening in the geomagnetic field (i.e., they propose the use of red ochre on skin) can have a scientific basis and may provide heath benefits. I propose that the emergence of the Alpine Jade culture in Europe and other Jade cultures in Asia, suggest that Jade, which is derived from the serpentinization process may allow further testing of my hypothesis that weakening geomagnetic field and spin-controlled reactions can mediate emerging viral diseases and large-scale deaths. I hypothesize that the iron oxide in Jade might interact with the magnetic field generated by the iron oxide from the serpentinization process to prevent disease.
It is my hope that more people will defend the Rules-based system that underline our constitutional democracy and reject those who argue that we should be able to abuse and threaten people because we don’t like the new ideas they are proposing or because they belong to groups they have deemed “the other”. History shows us that societies that fall for those lies suffer devastating consequences.
Note: For the record, all the authors contributed and were notified by the journal; this is standard for publishing in major journals; don’t believe the lies.
Hey Moses, do you have a PDF version I could read? Also, not that it matters too much. But I’m pretty sure the United States is a Constitutional Republic. If you have an old copy laying around, I’ll send you my email. Thanks for your help on this.