Tim Tai

A former School of Medicine researcher is suing Yale after his incubator was allegedly disconnected by a University vendor.

In October 2022, after working at the School of Medicine for over two years, Sam Lee, then a genetics researcher, learned that an incubator he had been using was disconnected from its nitrogen gas tank, killing all the specimens Lee had been studying, the scientist claims. This January, Lee filed a lawsuit against the School of Medicine.

Lawyers representing Yale filed a response to Lee’s claims, claiming that Lee does not have the right to seek damages after accepting the University’s policies on intellectual property and research materials. The University’s attorney described that Lee had been investigated for allegedly fraudulent research and grant applications before he had come to Yale. The University filed counterclaims claiming that it had suffered damages by paying Lee a salary. 

“Had Yale known the extent of Lee’s research misconduct, grant application misconduct, and retractions, Yale would not have hired him and would not have accepted possession and ownership of the laboratory equipment and biological materials,” Yale’s lawyers wrote.

Lee began working as an associate research scientist in the School of Medicine’s orthopedics and rehabilitation department in April 2019, according to the complaint Lee filed in October. Upon accepting employment, Lee’s laboratory equipment, including a nitrogen gas incubator, was shipped to Yale from Massachusetts General Hospital, where Lee had conducted research through Harvard University.

According to the complaint, the incubator housed just under 20,000 containers of specimens, including monoclonal antibodies for therapeutic purposes and patented special cells. These genetic materials “comprised the balance of Lee’s life’s work,” the complaint claimed.

Around October 2022, Lee was notified by a colleague that his incubator’s connection tubing had been disconnected from its nitrogen tank by Airgas, a company that supplies the School of Medicine’s nitrogen tanks, the suit alleges. Lee claims he confirmed the next month that his genetic specimens were destroyed. Lee claims that the colleague told him that the disconnection occurred due to an “accounting issue.”

“Presumably [the School of Medicine] had failed to pay the liquid nitrogen vendor,” the complaint alleges. “Because of that, the vendor ceased providing liquid nitrogen to keep the incubator at the necessary temperature.”

The lawsuit accuses Yale of breach of contract, negligence, tortious interference, statutory theft and engaging with his materials without permission

Lee claims that in September 2023, the School of Medicine’s lawyers admitted that an internal investigation “determined that the loss of Dr. S. Lee’s research was a result of a ‘mix-up’ in the ordering of tanks arising out of a vacancy” in the School of Medicine staff position. 

Yale’s attorneys denied both of Lee’s proposed explanations for why the incubator was disconnected in their answer to the complaint.

In response to Lee’s suit, lawyers for the University have claimed that because Lee’s laboratory equipment and biological materials were acquired with federal grant money, including from the National Institutes of Health, Yale — as the grantee institution — should be considered the owner of those materials when they were to Yale.

“Because the laboratory equipment and biological materials are regulated by federal statutes and regulations, Dr. S. Lee’s state common law claims fail,” the University’s attorneys wrote, citing the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, which gives federal law precedence over state law.

Attorneys for Yale pointed out that Lee delayed filing the lawsuit “for years, with no valid excuse for the delay.” Yale, they claim, has a limited ability to consider Lee’s allegations because witnesses have died or emigrated outside the U.S., and documents have been purged due to the passage of time.

Then, the defense lawyers accused Lee of a history of “fraudulent” engagement with research grants. Before working at Yale, Lee allegedly included inauthentic data on a grant application to the NIH, leading Massachusetts General Hospital, Lee’s employer at the time, to repay the NIH the funds it received for that grant. In 2021, Lee paid $215,000 to settle allegations from a federal prosecutor that he had knowingly included inauthentic data and falsified results in his NIH grant application.

The University’s lawyers pointed out that major corrections were issued on several of Lee’s published papers, and five were entirely retracted.

The University’s response to the complaint states that Yale did not renew Lee’s appointment after it learned of the NIH grant fraud settlement.

“Because of Dr. S. Lee’s fraud, Yale suffered damages by paying Dr. S. Lee a salary from 2019 to 2023,” the lawyers wrote.

Yale has filed three counterclaims against Lee, alleging that he breached his contract with the University by rarely conducting work in person at Yale facilities in New Haven, neglected Yale-owned biological materials and deceived Yale about his history with the grant fraud case. Yale asked for compensatory and punitive damages, attorneys’ fees, pre-judgment and post-judgment interest and a rescission of the parties’ contract.

A trial is scheduled for September 2027 at the Hartford Superior Court.