UC Fires Doctor Linked to Irvine Fertility Furor

SAN FRANCISCO —  The University of California Board of Regents, in a rare act of punishment, on Wednesday fired Dr. Sergio C. Stone, one of three physicians at the center of the 1995 UC Irvine fertility scandal.

The board rejected a recommendation by a panel of UC Irvine faculty, which held an extensive hearing and concluded in September that Stone should only be demoted. In firing Stone, the regents cited “multiple and serious violations of the Faculty Code of Conduct.”

The vote marks only the fourth time that the regents have dismissed a tenured professor since the late 1950s. At that time, then-UC President Clark Kerr pushed through lifetime tenure protections for professors to end an era in which faculty had been dismissed for refusing to sign anti-communist loyalty oaths.

Stone said after the vote that he had not decided whether to appeal his dismissal through the courts. “It has been five years,” he said in an interview. “I’m exhausted and destroyed.”

Before the vote, he took the extraordinary step of pleading for his job in open session before the board, granting the public a rare peek into university personnel matters usually handled behind closed doors.

“I am not the despicable person described by the administration,” Stone said. “If it were true, I would have left the university long ago.” He accused the administration of making him the scapegoat for a scandal that tarnished the university. “They continue to try to punish me for the sins and crimes of others,” he said.

The scandal involved the stealing of human eggs and embryos, which were implanted in unsuspecting women at UC Irvine’s now-defunct Center for Reproductive Health.

Stone was not accused of actually stealing eggs or embryos, but was convicted of fraudulently billing insurance companies. His two former partners, Ricardo H. Asch and Jose P. Balmaceda, face criminal charges but have fled the country to avoid prosecution.

Stone went on leave with pay in mid-1995. After his conviction, he was fined $50,000 and ordered to serve one year of home detention.

Although his license to practice medicine has not been revoked, Stone said he has been unable to work as a doctor because he cannot obtain malpractice insurance. He faces a civil suit by the university seeking more than $20 million from him and his two former partners.

Kurt Sjoberg, the state auditor, found that the three owed the university about $1.7 million for underreported income from their partnership with the university.

UC’s suit seeks to recoup its portion of the underreported income as well as more than $20 million the university has already paid to settle lawsuits from more than 100 infertile couples, including dozens who had their eggs given to other women without their permission.

Meanwhile, the effort to fire Stone worked its way through the UC system for 4 1/2 years, underscoring how difficult it is to persuade faculty to support firing a colleague.

A faculty panel is still considering whether to recommend firing Asch, who remains a tenured UC Irvine professor on unpaid leave. A native of Argentina, he is reportedly running a fertility clinic in Mexico City.

Balmaceda never had a tenured position, and UC officials let his contract expire. He now runs a fertility practice in his native Chile.

In Stone’s case, a four-member panel of his peers at UC Irvine, called the Committee on Privilege and Tenure, held hearings for 13 days and collected 2,000 pages of documents before concluding that although Stone had engaged in misconduct, penalties should fall short of termination because of mitigating factors.

In explaining its reasoning, the panel noted that a felony conviction in the course of one’s professional duty is normally sufficient cause for firing. But this was an unusual case, they wrote, because Stone was following a practice used by other physicians.

Specifically, Stone was convicted of writing reports suggesting that assistant surgeons were present during surgeries attended only by him, and for charging insurance companies for work that he said was done by his partners but in fact was done by medical residents.

None of the fraud charges were directly related to the theft of eggs.

“Professor Stone’s crime seems more akin to an error in administrative judgment than to a truly evil or malevolent act and, in our view, should be treated as such,” the committee wrote.

“Were it not for his association with the egg and embryo scandal [through his partnership with Asch and Balmaceda] it seems highly unlikely that he would have faced prosecution in this matter.”

In an appeal for leniency, the committee wrote: “We urge you to resist the temptation to find a scapegoat for a damaging scandal and to focus solely on professor Stone’s culpability as an individual.”

But UC Irvine Chancellor Ralph J. Cicerone, who then took up the case, said the faculty appeared to view each of Stone’s actions independently, without weighing their cumulative effect.

The chancellor said he was concerned not just about the conviction on nine felony counts, but also about Stone’s failure to report income, failure to obtain prior permission to do research on human subjects and failure to notify the university of ethical misconduct by his partners.

“I consider each of these as a serious breach of our standards of behavior,” Cicerone wrote. “Yet, these are not just isolated incidents of misbehavior. Rather they reflect a pattern of deception, dishonesty and callous disregard of the rules that guide our behavior.”

Richard C. Atkinson, president of the nine-campus UC system, agreed with the chancellor and forwarded the case to the regents.

But Melanie Blum, the Orange attorney who represented scores of couples from whom eggs and embryos were stolen, said she thought Stone, whom she called a minor player in the scandal, had suffered inordinately while Asch and Balmaceda “are enjoying life” and practicing medicine in other countries.

“Their lives are going on without interruption,” she said. “It doesn’t seem entirely fair that Sergio, who stayed here, is really taking all of the heat for it.”

The fertility scandal surfaced when a whistle-blower accused the three physicians of underreporting income. It soon drew national attention when allegations began to emerge that the doctors harvested eggs from women undergoing fertility treatments in four Southern California medical facilities from the late 1980s through the early 1990s, implanting eggs in other women and funneling others into research.

In some instances, children were conceived and born without the knowledge of women whose eggs were taken.

Times staff writer Peter Warren contributed to this story.