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August 31, 1995

IN REVIEW

Attempted murder charges filed in shooting Allegheny County prosecutors filed attempted murder charges Aug. 28 against two juveniles for the shooting of a Pitt student. A hearing before Common Pleas Judge Max Baer was delayed until Sept. 18 to give Bruce Cabbagestalk, 15, and Jerome Holliday, 17, time to obtain attorneys to defend them.

Prosecutors plan to ask that Cabbagestalk and Holliday be certified as adults in the July 13 shooting of Pitt engineering student Kevin Cecil, 21, of Boiling Springs, Cumberland County.

Baer ordered that Cabbage-stalk, of East Allegheny, and Holliday, of Central North Side, be held in Shuman Juvenile Detention Center until the September hearing. A third person charged in the attack, Robert Bledsoe, 20, also of Central North Side, is in the Allegheny County Jail.

The three previously had been charged with aggravated assault, robbery, conspiracy and carrying an unlicensed firearm.

Cecil has been paralyzed since being shot twice on Dithridge Street outside Webster Hall. City homicide detectives said the three would-be robbers were seeking money to buy beer when one of them opened fire on Cecil without warning.

Lying found on fellowship applications Pitt medical school researchers have found that as many as 20 percent of the applicants for a highly competitive training fellowship may have lied about their research credentials.

In addition, 30 percent of the candidates who claimed to have published articles in scientific journals misrepresented their publishing activities, the researchers found. Some candidates claimed to have published articles in nonexistent journals. Others cited nonexistent articles in actual journals; others falsely claimed their articles were "in press." Pitt-affiliated gastroenterologists Gail Sekas and William R. Hutton published their findings in the July 1 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. They based the report on a review of applications from 236 doctors competing for five openings in a Pitt gastroenterology fellowship program during a recent, unspecified year.

Sekas and Hutton undertook their study after confirming that a pair of suspiciously impressive resumes submitted by fellowship applicants were phony. They later reviewed the applications of 23 doctors seeking training fellowships in infectious diseases and found a similar percentage of falsified credentials.

In their report, Sekas and Hutton suggested several steps to reduce such ethical lapses, including requiring applicants for fellowship programs to submit copies of published articles or letters of acceptance for manuscripts that have been accepted but not yet published.

Filed under: Feature,Volume 28 Issue 1

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