Plagiarist USC celebrity doctor: What’s he been up to lately?

Is this an April Fool’s post? I’m not sure.

David Agus is the author of a book that included “at least 95 separate passages,” including my personal favorite (as reported by the LA Times): “Long sections of a chapter on the cardiac health of giraffes appear to have been lifted from a 2016 blog post on the website of a South African safari company titled, “The Ten Craziest Facts You Should Know About A Giraffe.”

It’s hard to know where to start with this. Maybe the first thing to note is that Agus is an oncologist and has no expertise on the cardiac health of giraffes. Who writes a book with an entire chapter on something he knows nothing about? Oh yeah, there were these guys . . . but at least when they were writing about something they knew nothing about, they wrote it in their own words.

I was particularly annoyed that Agus wrote, “I’m not pitching a tent to watch chimpanzees in Tanzania or digging through ant colonies to find the long-lived queen, for example . . . I went out and spoke to the amazing scientists around the world who do these kinds of experiments, and what I uncovered was astonishing.” Ummm, maybe this is the case with the ant colonies, but it obviously isn’t the case with the giraffes–I’m still stunned that he did an entire chapter on them! He didn’t speak with any scientists, “amazing” or otherwise. He just ripped off the website of a safari company.

I’d say, “What a loser,” but in the usual scheme of things this guy’s a winner. He still appears to be employed by USC–he’s the “founding director and CEO of the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine”–despite clearly violating their ethics code:

But that was a couple years ago. What’s the good doctor been up to lately?

18 Sep 2024: He’s featured in the Princeton alumni magazine, described as a “cancer specialist, researcher, and wellness advocate.” They forgot “author of a plagiarized book on giraffes”! Also this: “Sometimes he reminds patients that there is no miraculous cure-all.” I don’t know: plagiarism is a miraculous cure-all to writer’s block, is it not?

22 Oct 2024: He’s featured in Time Magazine: “‘Interventions that can affect outcome are what we need, and we need companies to put the capital up front and do the studies to show they can affect outcome,’ says Agus. ‘And once we do that, those are the technologies that we should all push and enable our patients to use, and they have to be accessible.'” And we should believe this, because . . . why, exactly? Because a rich USC med school professor with a demonstrated willingness to lie has money on the line? To be fair, the Time article does identify Agus as “founding director and co-CEO of the Ellison Institute of Technology.” But then I’d hope they’d take the next step and express a little skepticism about his motivations.

23 Feb 2025: TechCrunch reports: “Oracle co-founder [Larry Ellison] set out to reinvent agriculture on Hawaii’s Lāna’i Island, which he scooped up for $300 million back in 2012. . . . Ellison dreamed of AI-powered greenhouses and robot harvesters feeding the world sustainably. Instead, Sensei has been tripped up by tech snarls . . . and rookie mistakes. . . . Sensei, co-founded by a medical doctor [yup, David Agus, head of the “Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine”] and led currently by a tech exec who runs Sensei from Boston, has had small wins, reports the WSJ. Its lettuce and cherry tomatoes now appear at the island’s few local markets and restaurants. But constant delays, leadership shake-ups, and pricey blunders, including cannabis grow houses that needed to be gutted and rebuilt, highlight a tough truth: even bottomless funding is no match for the hard lessons of a specialized industry.”

Hmmm . . . I think the real lesson here is that copy-and-pasting material from a website on giraffes does not qualify you to run an agriculture company.

This was all a year after “Ellison-backed med tech startup Project Ronin closes doors . . . founded by Dave Hodgson, a tech leader with a history in medicine; David Agus, the cancer expert who treated Steve Jobs . . .; serial health entrepreneur Rowan Chapman; and Larry Ellison, Oracle founder and CTO.” Agus also treated Madonna, so, sure, why not throw a few million dollars at the guy.

What’s funny (actually not funny) to me is that people like Agus who are known liars still get trusted with money and resources in this way. The people in charge must think that Agus only lies to other people, never to them. Or maybe Agus is just a figurehead in these schemes: perhaps Ellison and USC are paying for his celebrity name, in which case they have a motivation to minimize his ethical transgressions.

So, to return to the first line of this post: Are USC and Larry Ellison fools for paying this guy? Are Princeton University, Time Magazine, Los Angeles magazine, and the New Yorker magazine fools for repeatedly promoting him? Or is this all transactional: they puff up his celebrity, and then they get to bask in the celebrity connection?