Yuan v. Johns Hopkins Univ.

DANIEL S. YUAN v. JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

No. 35

COURT OF APPEALS OF MARYLAND

Argued: December 6, 2016

September Term, 2016

March 29, 2017

LABOR & EMPLOYMENT—WRONGFUL TERMINATION—RESEARCH MISCONDUCT

Under Maryland law, an at-will employment contract may be legally terminated by either party at any time. There exists a public policy exception to the at-will employment rule for wrongful termination "when the motivation for the discharge contravenes some clear mandate of public policy[.]" Adler v. Am. Standard Corp., 291 Md. 31, 47, 432 A.2d 464, 473 (1981). Limitations to this public policy exception include that the policy relied on by the terminated employee should be clearly discernible and that the policy should not otherwise provide a legal remedy, such as damages, to the employee.

Petitioner, Daniel S. Yuan, M.D. ("Dr. Yuan"), alleged he was terminated for reporting research misconduct, in violation of 42 U.S.C. § 289b and 42 C.F.R. Part 93, in a federally funded project by researchers at Respondent institution, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine ("JHU"). We hold that we do not recognize the federal regulations prohibiting research misconduct as a clear public policy to support a tort claim for wrongful termination of employment. The federal regulations outline a self-regulation policy which directs the federally funded institutions to ensure research misconduct does not take place through an internal procedure established by the institution. The institutions are required to provide procedures to investigate misconduct, take appropriate action, and address retaliation. See 42 C.F.R. §§ 93.300-93.304. The scientific institution, not this Court, is in the best position and has the expertise to determine whether the research results of its employees amounted to impermissible research misconduct or permissible error or differences of opinion. Dr. Yuan did not follow the protocol outlined in JHU's policies for such claims. Under the circumstances presented in the case at bar, there was no clear violation of the research misconduct regulations to warrant a cause of action for wrongful termination.

Furthermore, Dr. Yuan notes that the federal regulations do not provide him a legal remedy in the form of damages and that by allowing a wrongful termination claim based on a public policy against research misconduct we would be granting such a remedy to employees. However, because the public policy he is alleging is not clearly discernible, as we cannot determine if a research misconduct violation occurred, we do not recognize the policy to establish his claim for wrongful termination. Thus, Dr. Yuan's at-will employment simply ended due to the expiration of his employment contract.

TORTS—CONVERSION—OWNERSHIP

Finally, Dr. Yuan claims that JHU violated its own policy when he was first told that he could have access to the research materials he collected, but was later denied such access. Here, we hold, as a matter of law, that JHU owned the frozen cells generated while Dr. Yuan was employed by JHU according to JHU's guidelines regarding ownership of research materials. Thus, it was proper for JHU to prevent Dr. Yuan's access to such materials. Accordingly, we affirm the judgment of the Court of Special Appeals.

Circuit Court for Baltimore City

Case No. 24-C-13-8243

Barbera, C.J. Greene, Adkins, McDonald, Hotten, Getty, Raker, Irma S., (Senior Judge, Specially Assigned), JJ.

Opinion by Greene, J.

In this case, Petitioner, Daniel S. Yuan, M.D. ("Dr. Yuan"), challenges the Court of Special Appeals' conclusion that there was no clear public policy mandate to support a claim for wrongful termination for reporting research misconduct in a federally funded project at Respondent institution Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine ("JHU"), a scientific research institution. Dr. Yuan was a researcher employed by JHU. The suit arises from Dr. Yuan's allegation that he was wrongfully terminated in retaliation for his repeated protests of research misconduct in violation of 42 U.S.C. § 289b and 42 C.F.R. Part 93.¹

We hold that these provisions regarding research misconduct do not provide a clear public policy to support a tort claim for wrongful termination of employment. The self-regulating provisions direct the federally funded scientific institutions to provide procedures to investigate allegations of research misconduct, take appropriate action, and address retaliation. See 42 C.F.R. §§ 93.300-93.304. The scientific institution, not thisCourt, is in the best position and has the expertise to determine whether the research results of its employees amounted to impermissible research misconduct or permissible error or differences of opinion. Dr. Yuan did not follow the protocol outlined in JHU's policies for research misconduct claims. Further, Dr. Yuan acknowledged in his brief filed in this case that the regulations do not provide him with legal redress in the form of damages and he therefore seeks tort damages based on a theory of wrongful termination. However, there was no clear violation of the research misconduct regulations to warrant a cause of action for wrongful termination.

Dr. Yuan also alleged conversion because after the termination of his employment, he was denied access to stored research materials he had collected. However, JHU owned the research materials pursuant to its policy, and it is well settled that a party may not convert that which it owns. Therefore, we affirm the judgment of the Court of Special Appeals.

FACTUAL AND PROCEDURAL BACKGROUND

Dr. Yuan alleged in a lengthy amended complaint the following facts:

Dr. Yuan was Board-certified in General Pediatrics and Pediatric Gastroenterology. He was employed by JHU as a researcher with the Pediatrics Faculty. In July 2001, he joined the lab of Dr. Jef Boeke ("Dr. Boeke"), a Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics and the head of a yeast genetics lab. The lab was largely funded through the National Institute of Health ("NIH"), an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services ("DHHS"). Between February 2002 and June 2011, the NIH provided over $11.8 million to the lab for research on the Synthetic LethalityAnalyzed by Microarray ("SLAM") project, which was an ambitious yeast genetics research project using a novel methodology, as well as a $34 million grant for a project related to the SLAM research. In Dr. Boeke's lab, Dr. Yuan was initially responsible for developing the computational infrastructure to manage the SLAM project's massive datasets.

When SLAM entered its Production phase, in 2004, Dr. Yuan discovered and reported to the Production team a concern that contaminating traces of DNA from preceding SLAM experiments had led to false positive results. However, the team resisted his concerns and suggestions for addressing the issue and instead began withholding data files from him.

Dr. Yuan stated that from 2005 through 2011, he repeatedly reported research misconduct concerning the yeast genetics research claiming that the SLAM researchers were falsifying the results. In particular, on November 28, 2005, Dr. Yuan emailed Dr. Boeke about issues he identified in research completed by Xuewen Pan ("Dr. Pan"), a post-doctoral fellow in Dr. Boeke's lab. Dr. Yuan stated that Dr. Pan's "genes are preselected," and that continuing with those research projects "will only generate more useless data." He also stated that the SLAM team had already established that "most of the [SLAM Project] hits being identified are bogus."

Dr. Pan's research was published in a biomedical journal, Cell, with Dr. Boeke as the senior author in early 2006. Moreover, Dr. Boeke cited Dr. Pan's research when he applied for grant renewals through the NIH. After the NIH renewed the SLAM project funding in late 2006, Dr. Boeke issued a new organizational chart which had the effect ofexcluding Dr. Yuan from extensive involvement with the SLAM research. Dr. Yuan maintained that he protested his lack of a definite professional role in the SLAM Project and found himself increasingly marginalized and excluded from the data management.

Between 2006 and 2008, the SLAM research was unsuccessful; the lab did not have significant results to report to NIH. Dr. Boeke asked other researchers to review the SLAM project data, excluding Dr. Yuan. The researchers corroborated Dr. Yuan's findings and found that the data had an extraordinarily high "False Discovery Rate." In the summer of 2008, Dr. Boeke decided not to renew the NIH grant for SLAM, although, some funding remained available to operate SLAM.

In January 2009, after analyzing Dr. Pan's microarray data from his Cell publication, Dr. Yuan determined that Dr. Pan could not have obtained the results he claimed. His conclusion was not that Dr. Pan fabricated the results; instead, Dr. Yuan asserted that Dr. Pan likely conducted the experiment with preconceptions of the results he wanted to find—and then managed to find those results. Dr. Yuan also concluded similarly with respect to a paper published in 2008 by Dr. Yu-yi Lin ("Dr. Lin") in Genes & Development. In January of 2009, Dr. Yuan also notified both Dr. Boeke and SLAM's project manager, Dr. Meluh, of the problems with Dr. Pan's 2006 and Dr. Lin's 2008 papers.

Dr. Yuan was informed by Dr. Boeke in December 2009 that Dr. Boeke would not be renewing his faculty contract for 2011, unless he was able to secure self-sustaining funding within the next year. Dr. Boeke explained this was due to limited funding;however, at that time, Dr. Boeke established three new full-time positions with the SLAM Project for three other individuals.

Dr. Yuan again reported problems with SLAM research, in January 2010, at a lab seminar where he identified bizarre zigzag patterns after plotting data for individual genes in SLAM's Production data in chronological order. Dr. Yuan concluded that these zigzags were both non-random and unpredictable and were also large enough...