Dr. David Agus has a pretty stellar medical reputation. His social credit score is even higher, especially if read through the lens of “knows all the right people/does all the right things”…

Dr. David B. Agus is one of the world’s leading doctors and pioneering biomedical researchers. He is the founding director and CEO of the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine and a professor of medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California. A medical oncologist, Dr. Agus leads a multidisciplinary team of researchers dedicated to the development and use of technologies to guide doctors in making health-care decisions tailored to individual needs. An international leader in global health and approaches for personalized healthcare, Dr. Agus serves in leadership roles at the World Economic Forum and is co-chair of the Global Health Security Consortium. He is also a CBS News contributor.

He’s got all those boxes ticked, plus the celebrity connections, thanks to both his surgery practice and the CBS gig.

So, ho, boy. It’s certainly been awkward for CBS. Their network contributor, a younger, livelier Ben Stein-type – seen here in a classic COVID alarmist network offering from a year ago…

…had written a new book. As author of three previous bestsellers, CBS was looking forward to promoting the latest from their in-house, world-renowned celebrity, allowing Agus to do so in appearances on CBS news shows. His well-known, well-heeled friends were also ready to join in the publicity and celebratory blitz.

The publication of a new book by Dr. David Agus, the media-friendly USC oncologist who leads the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine, was shaping up to be a high-profile event.

Agus promoted “The Book of Animal Secrets: Nature’s Lessons for a Long and Happy Life” with appearances on CBS News, where he serves as a medical contributor, and “The Howard Stern Show,” where he is a frequent guest. Entrepreneur Arianna Huffington hosted a dinner party at her home in his honor. The title hit No. 1 on Amazon’s list of top-selling books about animals a week before its March 7 publication.

Everyone was looking forward to this latest release. Until the brakes came screaming on.

Why, my goodness, said the LA Times. That new book of “yours”? We’ve found 95 different examples of things other people wrote in it.

We found 95 instances of plagiarism in a USC scientist’s new book. Sales have been suspended

Care to explain?

…The Times contacted Agus and the book’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, with its findings late last week. On Monday, both announced that sales of the book will be suspended immediately pending a rewrite that includes appropriate credit for the passages in question.

“I was recently made aware that in writing The Book of Animal Secrets we relied upon passages from various sources without attribution, and that we used other authors’ words. I want to sincerely apologize to the scientists and writers whose work or words were used or not fully attributed,” Agus said in a statement. “I take any claims of plagiarism seriously.”

I’ll bet you do, now…

…The passages in question range in length from a sentence or two to several continuous paragraphs. The sources borrowed from without attribution include publications such as the New York Times and National Geographic, scientific journals, Wikipedia and the websites of academic institutions.

The book also leans heavily on uncredited material from smaller and lesser-known outlets. A section in the book on queen ants appears to use several sentences from an Indiana newspaper column by a retired medical writer. Long sections of a chapter on the cardiac health of giraffes appear to have been lifted from a 2016 blog post on the website of a South African safari company titled, “The Ten Craziest Facts You Should Know About A Giraffe.”

The book also takes sentences written or spoken by other scientists and presents them as Agus’ original thoughts.

Call me jaded, but I don’t think the good doctor takes plagiarism as seriously as he claims to. One, two, five or six…maybe you garbled the footnotes. But NINETY-FIVE, in some cases almost verbatim verbiage lifts?

…Elisabeth Bik is a microbiologist and scientific integrity consultant who specializes in identifying manipulated data and images in scientific research. The book passages she reviewed at The Times’ request required far less forensic work, she said.

“It’s very bad. The examples I’m looking at look like literally copy-paste jobs,” said Bik, who described them as “patchwork plagiarism.”

I didn’t fall off the cabbage truck yesterday.

CBS yanked their promotion piece off their website just that quickly when the LAT story broke. In fact, the CBS link from the LAT goes to this now:

YOICKS.

…Agus is a CBS News contributor and reports on a broad range of medical topics for CBS News’ broadcasts. He previously authored the “The End of Illness,” “A Short Guide to a Long Life,” and “The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health.”

A CBS News spokesperson said, “We are reviewing the situation with Dr. Agus’ book.”

“As a news organization, we take accusations of plagiarism seriously,” the spokesperson said Monday. “Dr. Agus is not currently scheduled to make any upcoming appearances on our air.”

The good doctor may be surprised to find out how seriously other people take plagiarism compared to his laissez-faire interpretation.

Agus’s statement on the front of his personal webpage is a mealy-mouthed, “mistakes were made” mea culpa. So similar to every lazy and pathetic exercise in moving sideways around accepting personal blame we’ve grown used to seeing from our elites, that it’s practically plagiarism in itself.

We’ll see what Simon & Schuster does with the rewrite, if it does, indeed, happen.

What I do not understand is the mindset of these phenomenally talented, incredibly privileged, overweeningly smug doyens/doyennes of our crackly upper crust. Do they become so enervated by their indescribably rich, so-much-better-than-you lives that they blithely throw it all away out of boredom? Arrogance?

Because they can?

I don’t get it.

But I sure am tired of it.