Hank Campbell

In 2010, when Dr. Paul Muizelaar of U.C. Davis began performing illegal experimental treatments on terminally ill brain cancer patients, he earned over $800,000. (1)

That's pretty good money for an academic, especially while we are enduring the political theater of universities canceling core curriculum classes to try and pressure taxpayers into agreeing to tax increases if we 'care about education'.  

Let's not pretend sports gets more attention.  Only 4 coaches make more than that, and 3 'executives' who run the byzantine higher education behemoth.   But 27 other doctors make more than him in the U.C. system. (2)

He brings in money, as he will tell you.  Apparently that has a price. U.C. Davis has disclosed that they ordered Muizelaar to "immediately cease and desist" any research with human subjects they don't approve in advance. The university had already notified the government  that he had committed "serious and continuing noncompliance" with federal regulations.  Muizelaar has been chairman of the U.C. Davis Department of Neurological Surgery since 1997. Also banned was Dr. Rudolph J. Schrot, an assistant professor who has worked with him for 13 years and was brought in to explore the idea of using bacteria to treat deadly brain tumors, which is what got them into trouble.

Is he a kind of maverick doctor bucking regulations to try and save patients?  Sure, but rules are rules. Either way, in a 'teach to the protocol' environment controlled by government committees, those doctors are going into retirement anyway. The school seems to have given him so much leeway because he brings in so much money, according to an article by Marjie Lundstromin the Sacramento Bee. They reported it when they discovered the approval they assumed he had was not in place. Now they could lose a lot of funding.

Obviously, human experimentation is tightly controlled in the United States.  Not only did he break the law, he doesn't even have a license to practice medicine in California.  How so?  U.C. Davis got him a 'special faculty permit' issued by the Medical Board of California. "I'll be frank with you, I'm world famous, so they gave me the license to practice here," he said. "I can go sit for the exams, but why would I do that?"

He's even more famous now.  He just put U.C. Davis on the map for all the wrong reasons, basically an academic version of that goofy pepper-spraying security guard.(3)  He got consent from three terminally ill patients to introduce bacteria into their open head wounds. Post-operative bacterial infections, the kind of thing most doctors avoid, might help them, they hypothesized.  But two of the patients got sepsis and died.

Brain science is having a tough week.  A neuroscience Ph.D. student shot up a theater in Colorado at the "Dark Knight Rises" premiere too. Social totalitarian progressives blame the gun, of course, which is kind of like blaming a spoon for making Rosie O'Donnell fat(4), but you can just as easily blame neuroscience for attracting kooks as you can guns.

Muizelaar is not completely without things to do.  He is still on grant committees to approve proposals for the NIH.

NOTE:

(1) And still does. They only banned human experimentation without their approval.

(2) So much for 'selection bias' (i.e. academia does not pay enough) as an explanation for why conservatives are so underrepresented in academia. That whooshing sound you hear are all of the job applications filing in.

(3) He's also still employed by UC Davis. Presumably he cannot pepper spray passive student protesters unless he has prior approval from the highest levels too.

(4) Why pick on her?  She is an anti-gun zealot who famously argued that her childrens' bodyguards needed to have guns because she is famous.

James Eagan Holmes, 24-year-old graduate student at the University of Colorado-Denver, was arrested - not shot on sight - outside the theater clad in black body armor and armed with three weapons, which shows you Colorado police have more restraint than anyone else on the planet.