As it turned out, the Boston Principal Investigators (PIs) cheated on almost every patient. The Burroughs Wellcome PIs had quickly realized that AZT was so reliably deadly that they were hard-pressed to keep the trial recruits alive for the full six-month study. The Boston team solved this dilemma by lying about the length of time patients were in the trials. The company incentivized this sort of fraud by paying its PIs according to how many months they kept the AZT trial subjects alive. “Simply put,” says Lauritsen, “the doctors received a great deal more money,” from longer-term enrollments.
