neurologist

Sidney Gilman’s Shift Led to Insider Trading Case

But as he worked through the slides, it became clear to the audience on that day in July 2008 that the drug was not delivering and that its makers, Elan and Wyeth, could lose out on blockbuster profits. Along with other Wall Street analysts in the front rows, David Moskowitz zapped messages to clients to dump shares of the companies. “I can remember gasping” at the results, Mr. Moskowitz said.

Little did anyone in the room know that 12 days earlier, Dr. Gilman had e-mailed a draft of the presentation to a trader at an affiliate of one of the nation’s most prominent hedge funds, according to prosecutors, allowing the fund, SAC Capital, and its affiliate to sell over $700 million of Elan and Wyeth stock before Dr. Gilman’s public talk.

Last month, the trader was arrested on insider trading charges after Dr. Gilman agreed to cooperate with prosecutors to avoid charges.

While he appeared a grandfatherly academic, Dr. Gilman, 80, was living a parallel life, one in which he regularly advised a wide network of Wall Street traders through a professional matchmaking system. Those relationships afforded him payments of $100,000 or more a year — on top of his $258,000 pay from the University of Michigan — and travels with limousines, luxury hotels and private jets.

The riddle for Dr. Gilman’s longtime friends and colleagues is why a nationally respected neurologist was pulled into the high-rolling life of a consultant to financiers and how he, by his own admission, crossed the line into criminal behavior.

“My first reaction was, ‘That can’t possibly be right,’ ” said Dawn Kleindorfer, a former student of Dr. Gilman’s at Michigan.

What is clear is that Dr. Gilman made a sharp shift in his late 60s, from a life dedicated to academic research to one in which he accumulated a growing list of financial firms willing to pay him $1,000 an hour for his medical expertise, while he was overseeing drug trials for various pharmaceutical makers. Among the firms he was advising was another hedge fund that was also buying and selling Wyeth and Elan stock, though the authorities have given no sign they have questioned those trades.

His conversion to Wall Street consultant was not readily apparent in his lifestyle in Michigan and was a well-kept secret from colleagues. Public records show no second home, and no indication of financial distress. Nevertheless, he was willing to share a glimpse of his lifestyle with a 17-year-old student whom he sat next to on a flight from New York to Michigan a few months ago, telling her how his Alzheimer’s research allowed him to enjoy fine hotels in New York and limousine rides to the airport.

“I wouldn’t say he was egotistical because he didn’t come across as obnoxious, but he definitely mentioned the kind of lifestyle that he had,” said the student, Anya Parampil, who had been upgraded to first class.

Dr. Gilman’s role in the case involving SAC Capital has largely been overshadowed by the possibility that investigators may be narrowing in on the firm’s billionaire founder, Steven A. Cohen. Mr. Cohen and his firm have not been accused of any wrongdoing in acting on the insider information.

Colleagues now say Dr. Gilman’s story is a reminder of the corrupting influence of money. The University of Michigan, where he was a professor for decades, has erased any trace of him on its Web sites, and is now reviewing its consulting policy for employees, a spokesman said.

The case also turns the spotlight back onto the finance world’s expert networks, which match sources in academia and at publicly traded companies — like Dr. Gilman — with traders at hedge funds and financial firms.

The networks have been a central target of prosecutors in the sprawling insider trading investigations that have resulted in dozens of convictions in recent years.

Some networks have closed, and now many are shifting their focus outside the financial world, hoping to make up lost revenue by consulting for corporate America.

Days after the charges were filed, Dr. Gilman retired and has gone into seclusion at his home on a wooded lot overlooking the Huron River on the outskirts of Ann Arbor, which is listed in public records as worth $400,000. He declined to open the door to a reporter last week, directing questions to his lawyer. “I can’t discuss it,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Stephanie Steinberg contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/business/sidney-gilmans-shift-led-to-insider-trading-case.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Bits: Study Shows Multitasking’s Toll on Memory

A growing body of research shows that juggling many tasks, as so many people do in this technological era, can divide attention and hurt learning and performance. Does it also hinder short-term memory?

That’s the implication of a study being published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a respected journal. The research shows that multitasking takes a significantly greater toll on the working memory of older people.

Researchers said the key finding of the new study is that people between the ages of 60 and 80 have significantly more trouble remembering tasks after experiencing a brief interruption than do people in their 20s and 30s.

During the study, subjects were asked to look at a scene, then were interrupted for several seconds by an image of a person’s face. They were asked to identify the person’s gender and approximate age, and then returned to answer questions about the earlier scene. Older subjects found it much harder to disengage from the interruption and reestablish contact with the scene, the researchers found.

Even though the study did not revolve around interruptions from cellphones or other gadgets, one researcher said the results provide a “clear extrapolation” to the impact of a stream of incoming rings and buzzes.

“Technology provides so much more of an interference than what we did here,” said the researcher, Dr. Adam Gazzaley, a neurologist at the University of California at San Francisco. Indeed, the paper argues that studies like this are becoming increasingly important as aging adults spend more time in a work force with heavy multitasking demands.

“This issue is growing in scope and societal relevance as multitasking is being fed by a dramatic increase in the accessibility and variety of electronic media,” Dr. Gazzaley said.

The test, in addition to observing and measuring subjects’ behavior, also entailed observing their brains using real-time imaging to understand the neurological mechanisms at play. The images showed differences in the brains of younger people and older people following an interruption; in the younger subjects, the brain areas that had been engaged during interruption ceased to be engaged more quickly, but in the older subjects, those areas continued to remain stimulated.

Dr. Gazzaley said the researchers initially hypothesized that the reason older subjects remained engaged with the “interruption” was because they simply became more focused on the face. But what he said the research shows instead is a “diminished ability” to reactivate the networks involved in the initial task.

Gary Small, director for the Center on Aging at the University of California at Los Angeles, said the research was consistent with existing studies — and with many peoples’ everyday experiences. “You say, I’ve got to go to the market to get eggs, but then you get home and you’ve got 20 other things and you forgot the eggs,” said Dr. Small, a psychiatrist and the author of “iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind.” He added: “As your brain ages, it’s harder to get back to the task at hand after an interruption.”

Dr. Gazzaley’s study looked at a type of memory called working memory, which is considered a precious and finite resource that people tap into when they are engaged in a task, like doing a work project or having a conversation. The study did not look at the effects of multitasking on long-term memory. However, Dr. Gazzaley said there was a relationship between people’s ability to develop long-term memories and the amount of time they spend focused on a particular experience. In other words, if interruptions make it difficult for older people to remember what they were doing in the short run, it also could hurt their ability to record those experiences over the long run, he said.

But Dr. Gazzaley said the study sheds more light on the reasons that short-term memories seem suddenly to go empty, as when someone stands in front the refrigerator, forgetting what it is he went to get.

“Events such as these increase in frequency as we get older — the classic senior moment. We now understand that this is not necessarily a memory problem per se, but often the result of an interaction between attention and memory,” he said. “For example, a phone call or text that interrupts us on the way to the refrigerator will negatively impact our ability to remember what we were going to the refrigerator to get in the first place.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=55e6a06a93ddeb6fb7ae878460860ad5

Sidney Gilman’s Shift Led to Insider Trading Case

Bits: Study Shows Multitasking’s Toll on Memory

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