Whistleblower

Kessler as dean carried two cell phones and a BlackBerry; friends and associates marveled at his ability to glide between conversations. "No time is wasted," one said. "It doesn't matter if he's getting into a cab or grocery shopping."

His multitasking has also exhibited itself in other ways. Kessler acquired a medical degree as a pediatrician at Harvard and a law degree from the University of Chicago within the same year, thanks to overlapping studies for each. "I thought it was some kind of mistake when I first saw the résumé," says Jeanne Robertson, the ex-UCSF Foundation chair. Kessler soon doubled up again, doing a medical residency at the Johns Hopkins University hospital in Baltimore while commuting to Capitol Hill to work as a Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee staffer for Republican Senator Orrin Hatch.

"David is blessed with a lot of energy," says Paulette Kessler, a University of Chicago–trained attorney who has practiced law off and on during the couple's 34-year marriage. They met when she was an undergraduate at Smith College in Massachusetts and Kessler was at Amherst nearby. (Their daughter is in her second year of law school at Georgetown; their son works for a government relations firm in the nation's capital.)

"This is someone of extraordinary righteousness," says John Greenspan, director of UCSF's AIDS Research Institute and one of the few university colleagues willing to speak about Kessler for the record. "From my observations, I've found him to be of impeccable integrity."

Yet insiders who praise Kessler's stewardship of the medical school are similarly complimentary of the man who fired him, the mild-mannered Bishop, who is credited with helping UCSF make great strides during his 10 years as chancellor.

Colleagues describe Bishop as a voracious reader with an engaging sense of humor who is "enormously erudite." Like Kessler, he has a compelling personal story. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, he spent his youth banging out hymns in the Lutheran church where his father was the minister. According to his official biography, he attended a two-room school from the first through the eighth grade before studying medicine at Harvard.

Bishop's work in the mid-'70s with fellow UCSF professor Harold Varmus (which earned the pair the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1989) involved the study of ocogenes, genes that control growth in living cells and which, under certain circumstances, can go haywire and turn cancerous. It led to great strides in the diagnosis and treatment of certain cancers.

Friends say it was Varmus who introduced Kessler to Bishop. Asked to comment for this article, Varmus, who heads Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and who is a friend of both men, said he would prefer to "take a pass."

That echoes the reticence at UCSF, where the initial shock of Kessler's ouster has given way to guarded resignation. "David's firing has created a chilling atmosphere," one veteran staffer said. "People who might have been relatively free with their opinions aren't so comfortable right now."

Still, this most extraordinary tiff involving renowned players at one of the nation's leading medical institutions may be headed for the kind of public airing that UCSF officials seem to want to avoid.

In January, Republican state Senator Abel Maldonado, an influential member of the Senate Education Committee and frequent critic of how the UC system conducts its affairs, wrote to Bishop complaining that the circumstances surrounding Kessler's dismissal were "extremely disturbing" and calling the financial documents at the center of the dispute "nothing short of alarming."

Meanwhile, his colleague, Democratic state Senator Leland Yee, was so angered by what he described as the university's attempts to keep the KPMG report from becoming public by initially suggesting that it couldn't be released without the firm's permission that he introduced special legislation to force UC to be more open in the future. "I think it's fairly obvious that [UCSF] tried to hide behind its [outside] accountants because the results weren't flattering to their argument," Yee says.

Last month, after honoring Maldonado's request to turn over hundreds of pages of materials related to the Kessler matter, Bishop sent a delegation to Sacramento to press the case that Kessler's claims are without merit. But the senator was unimpressed, and now says more needs to be disclosed. "Obviously the regents have the right to let someone go, but the more you peel the onion, the more this smells," Maldonado says.

Kessler, who remains a tenured professor at UCSF, isn't saying whether he may sue the university. For now, at least, he appears content in his role. On April 2, UC Berkeley's School of Public Health honored him as a National Health Hero for his leadership in challenging the U.S. tobacco industry. Former Vice President Al Gore presented the award via video.

Kessler lectures, remains active on several nonprofit boards, and has resumed work on the obesity treatise begun in 2002 but set aside by the heavy demands of the dean's job. He has also acquired some in-house counsel. "Obviously what has happened [at UCSF] is incredibly personal," Paulette Kessler says. "I'm not saying we don't take it personally, because we do. But David has his work and his research, and he's moving forward."