Met him. instinct told me that's a nasty guy. Now, he is! alleges now.

Billy Graham policy: Never be alone with a female in a closed door setting. For

** http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/famed-cancer-biologist-allegedly-sexually-harassed-women-decades

For decades, women at Salk have warned female colleagues not to be alone with Inder Verma. “It was on everybody’s mouth that he was a harasser,” says Monica Zoppè, now a molecular and cell biologist at the Institute of Clinical Physiology in Pisa, Italy. As a brand-new postdoc in Verma’s lab in 1992, she had not yet heard the warnings when Verma forcibly grabbed and kissed her, a few weeks after she had arrived from Italy, she alleges.

When you touch in the way that has been described in these examples, under the law, these are called assault.

Salk administrators have received at least two formal complaints and three additional reports about Verma’s behavior since the late 1970s, and they have hired an outside investigator to probe a complaint about him at least once before last week. They also have repeatedly protected him, say women who formally complained and other people with knowledge of the institute’s actions. Zoppè, for example, alleges that after she formally complained about Verma’s behavior, Salk administrators told her not to speak to anyone about the incident.

The allegations reported to Science are not as egregious as some examples of harassment in the scientific world. And many women who worked with Verma at Salk say he treated them with respect. “I found him to be an honorable and very supportive supervisor,” says Jane Visvader, a leading breast cancer researcher at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Parkville, Australia, who was a postdoc in Verma’s lab in the late 1980s. Visvader was one of 15 women Science contacted who said they experienced no harassment when working with or for Verma; another 12 women ignored or declined repeated interview requests. Among Verma’s backers, several praised his mentoring and described his kindness.

Yet some women who allege harassment say that after the incidents, they made career choices that would allow them to dodge Verma’s influence, or at least his presence. “I have been avoiding him for 30 years,” says Pamela Mellon, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She was an assistant professor at Salk in the mid-1980s when, she says, Verma grabbed her breasts during a party at his home.

Verma declined to answer a list of questions from Science, but he issued a general denial in a statement released after Salk suspended him last week: “I have never used my position at the Salk Institute to take advantage of others. I have also never engaged in any sort of intimate relationship with anyone affiliated with the Salk Institute. I have never inappropriately touched, nor have I made any sexually charged comments, to anyone affiliated with the Salk Institute. I have never allowed any offensive or sexually charged conversations, jokes, material, etc., to occur at the Salk Institute.”