Gene Therapy Pioneer William French Anderson To Be Freed From Prison This Spring
By Laura Coleman
Not for the first time, the criminal justice system appears to have erred in pursuit of a conviction. In light of this particular situation’s unchecked possible crime – Chinese espionage – the mismanagement of evidence in the case of Dr. William French Anderson, the 81-year-old “Father of Gene Therapy,” could one day be considered a national tragedy. In less than two months Anderson will be released from prison after spending almost 12 years incarcerated for a crime he has always insisted he never committed. Once free, he is poised to continue his quest to be exonerated by pleading his case to the highest court in the nation, the U.S. Supreme Court.
(see ‘FRENCH ANDERSON’ Page 14 | March 16, 2018 BEVERLY HILLS
Over the course of Anderson’s incarceration, armed with new evidence that clearly layers doubt on his conviction, he has attempted to plead his case before nine courts – five state, four federal. All have returned summary denials with nary a comment. Stated Anderson: “Every situation there was supposed to be a written ruling and instead I’ve had a summary denial, which simply says, ‘This petition is denied.’ Period. No explanation. No ruling. Nothing written. Simply denied.” At the time of Anderson’s arrest on July 30, 2004 for allegedly molesting a juvenile – the daughter of a University of Southern California professor who just days after the arrest appears to have filed a patent in China based on research pioneered by Anderson into using Interleukin-12 (IL-12) to treat radiation exposure – Anderson was regarded as the world’s foremost scientist in gene therapy. The girl’s mother, Dr. Yi Zhao, had served as Anderson’s second-in-command at the USC Gene Therapy Laboratories, which he founded in 1992 following his ground-breaking work at National Institutes of Health where he had performed the world’s first successful gene therapy procedure.
Anderson, whose 178 IQ outranks that of geniuses Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, said he had origInally been working in pursuit of a way to cure cancer when he stumbled on a way to manipulate IL-12 to allow cells to heal from radiation poisoning. “It has enormous military implications [which] I wasn’t thinking about. I was only thinking about cancer,” Anderson said. It is this lack of understanding about the potential military applications that Anderson contends caused him to become the victim of Chinese espionage. Such an allegation is not without precedent. A decade after Anderson’s arrest, six Chinese citizens – including two USC-trained professors who graduated with electrical engineering degrees in 2006 – were charged by the Justice Department with espionage.
To this day, Zhao continues to be listed on USC’s website as an Assistant Professor of Research Medicine. Zhao’s faculty webpage credits her with having published just once, in 2005, with the abstract listing her as a coauthor along with Anderson and two others. The 2005 publication’s conclusion is particularly meaningful in light of Anderson’s arrest and Zhao’s subsequently published patent in China: “Soluble factor(s) from bone marrow cells can rescue lethally irradiated mice by protecting endogenous hematopoietic stem cells.” A 2002 email from USC’s Deputy Director at the time Nolan Gomm to Carol Mauch, currently USC’s general counsel, speculated that the value of an anti-irradiation product derived from IL-12 could be around $9 billion. According to a news article published in China last year, Qingdao Litai Kang Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd, which Zhao founded in China to pursue work based on her Asian patent, appears to have created an anti-irradiation drug to help patients with tumors, which the company eventually plans to sell in the U.S. In 2010, a Chinese journal reported that Zhao’s company had successfully tested IL-12 on monkeys as part of its research with a military linked science institute. While it now appears clear that the Chinese military has an antidote to lethal radiation after radiation, unlike the United States, Anderson said that it was only after his conviction that he concluded that Zhao engineered the molestation allegations in order to take control of the lab. “I think it’s very unlikely that he’s guilty,” opined Pulitzer-prize winning author Jared Diamond, Anderson’s one-time roommate while the two were pre-med students at Harvard University. “French has character traits…that make him very prone to be naive or do foolish things. I have no difficulty at all picturing him setting himself up for what happened.” Diamond is among hundreds of prominent individuals, including Nobel laureates, scientists, professors and longtime friends who came forward in the wake of Anderson’s arrest to support his claim of innocence. “I don’t see the slightest indication that he did what he was accused of,” Diamond added. “What I saw of French and French’s sexuality was normal American adult heterosexual behavior with not the slightest hint of interest in minors.” In fact, the results of a plethysmography test, which the L.A. County Superior Court judge refused to allow Anderson’s trial attorney to present to the jury, found that Anderson had no pedophiliac tendencies.
His sentence carries with it a lifetime of consequences, including having to register as a sex offender and having most people instinctively believe that it’s true. At least for the next five years he will have to wear an ankle monitor and be restricted in his activities, including how far he can drive from his home. His wife, Kathy, a luminary in her own right who retired as chief of Surgery from Children’s Hospital Los Angeles a few weeks before Anderson’s arrest, has stood by her husband’s side from the moment he first told her he had been arrested. But what Anderson still desires, beyond living once again with his wife of 56 years, is to have the world recognize his innocence. Following his ninth summary denial earlier this year, this time by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in February Anderson’s attorney Doug Otto filed a Writ of Certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court asking the Court to review the decision.
“I’m not sure if my case is unique and I’ve been kept in prison simply to shut me up and not allow me a public voice, or if I’m simply one of thousands. I don’t know,” Anderson surmised in one phone call from the California Institution for Men in Chino, where he has spent the past seven years sleeping in a dormitory with 100 other men over 65. “There is one piece of evidence and that is that the Attorney General did submit a document in which it states, and I quote: ‘Anderson is expected to die in prison.’” It appears, however, that the world’s one-time foremost scientist in gene therapy will not die in prison. Otto maintains that if a litany of exculpatory evidence had been allowed into Anderson’s trial, the jurors would have made a very different decision in July 2006 when he was convicted. The conviction relied largely on the testimony of the girl, who was 19 at the time of the trial, and a sting recording outside the South Pasadena Library made by the L.A. Sheriff’s Department. The case, however, is by no means black and white. Email correspondence between Anderson and the girl, whom he had spent years mentoring from the time she was 10 to 14 at the behest of her mother, conveys a nuanced relationship in her teenage years where the scientist appears to treat her more like a close friend than a mentee.
The recording, which the Courier listened to, is chilling, particularly so because at the end of the conversation, after having apologized to the girl, Anderson offers her a ride in his car. The recording begins with the girl, who is presumably wearing a hidden recording device, laughing with police. The girl then exits a car, walks for a while, eventually using the bathroom before continuing her walk. With the exception of a few unintelligible lines uttered to people she seemingly knows, the girl is silent. When she encounters Anderson, she immediately accuses him of molesting her. Throughout the conversation, it is clear that she is in control; he comes across as meek and distraught. It is hard not to believe that he is guilty when listening to the recording. Anderson readily admits that the recording, in which he appears to be apologizing to the girl for molesting her, makes him appear guilty. However, he has long contended that she never accused him of molesting her; instead, he asserts that she asked him why he pushed her so hard academically, and it is to that statement that he is responding with apologies.
In the intervening years since the recording was made in 2004, five technology experts have gone on record in support of Anderson’s claim that the recording was altered. In 2008, signal processing expert Pablo Valencia submitted a signed declaration that after having analyzed the digital audio recording using forensic software, he came to the conclusion that the dialogue was rearranged to make Anderson appear guilty. “My feeling is that…French has been the victim of unethical behavior by the police,” Valencia told the Courier. Further, Otto said he has evidence that documents the falseness of every piece of damaging evidence used against Anderson during the jury trial to convict him, in addition to documentation that the L.A. Sheriff’s Department falsified evidence. Anderson said he plans to file a civil lawsuit against the department upon his release to force an investigation.
Anderson further contends that the reason his alleged victim never filed a civil suit after his criminal conviction was because the attorneys who had represented the family realized it was “a set-up.” “They could easily have won a lawsuit,” Anderson said. “We had no defense. What defense would we have? I had been convicted.” By comparison, a $34 million civil verdict against O.J. Simpson finding him responsible for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman followed his notorious acquittal for their murder. Indeed, it was that very case that shone a public light on the fact that police are not immune from planting evidence in cases where they suspect guilt.
Whether or not Anderson’s latest effort to move forward with his petition for innocence gains traction and the U.S. Supreme Court actually gives him a chance to plead his case remains to be seen. And as to what the world has lost out on by imprisoning one of the nation’s top scientists for over a decade is complete conjecture. But one thing is certain: China has surged ahead of the U.S. in creating an anti-irradiation drug using the data that Anderson pioneered in his USC lab.