Are the cases of Butch Davis and Bonnie Yankaskas similar? Were the two UNC-Chapel Hill employees, each quite well-regarded in their respective fields, treated equally?

Should they have been?

News & Observer Executive Editor John Drescher raises these points in a recent column comparing the way UNC-Chapel Hill Holden Thorp dealt with two high profile cases.

One: Butch Davis and the UNC football situation. The other: Bonnie Yankaskas, the epidemiologist harshly sanctioned by the university because a cancer research database she oversaw was infiltrated by a hacker.

As Drescher points out, there were plenty of similarities between the two cases, and yet, the results were quite different.

Read on.

A story last week about UNC researcher Bonnie Yankaskas prompted a lot of questions from readers related to the notion that the university has "scapegoated" her - which is how at least one of her colleagues has characterized the situation.

As you may recall: Yankaskas is a nationally prominent epidemiologist who for the last 15 years has run the Carolina Mammography Registry, a federally funded research study that analyzes mammograms submitted by radiologists across North Carolina.

The database containing much of the data was hacked in 2007, an infiltration not discovered until 2009. As the project's principal investigator, Yankaskas was held responsible for the breach and punished for it. She was demoted and her salary was cut nearly in half.

Yankaskas has appealed the punishment, saying she should not be held responsible for data security since that's not her field of expertise.

My story last week led some readers to wonder whether anyone besides Yankaskas was punished for the gaffe, which compromised 114,000 social security numbers. (UNC says there's no evidence those numbers were copied or removed)

Here's what UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp had to say on the issue. He addressed it late last fall at a meeting with faculty.

"Dr. Yankaskas has not been scapegoated. Other members of her staff were also disciplined in conjunction with the security breach, consistent with their roles and responsibilities. Dr. Yankaskas had more responsibility than they did for the deplorable state of computer security in her project, so her supervisors recommended that she be dismissed. At the end of the day I concluded that a case for dismissal had not been met, but I agreed with the Hearings Committee that her neglect of duty warranted demotion and a pay cut."

The matter is now going to mediation.

The UNC School of Medicine is expanding into Charlotte and Asheville.

The university has announced plans for regional campuses in those two cities, allowing the medical school to expand its class from 160 this year to 180 by 2012.

Those campuses will serve as clinical training sites for third and fourth-year med students.

In Asheville, the school will work in conjunction with the Mission Health System, which will contribute $7 million to accommodate students at its hospital, and the Mountain Area Health Education Center.

In Charlotte, the regional campus will collaborate with the Carolinas HealthCare System and UNC Charlotte.  The campus will be located at the Carolinas Medical Center, and Carolinas HealthCare will contribute $4 million to renovate its facility to accommodate students.

This initiative is a scaled-back version of an earlier plan to expand the UNC-CH med school to 230 students. That plan proved too costly.

At UNC-Chapel Hill, a cancer researcher held responsible for a security breach involving a computer service is fighting a demotion and pay cut.

Bonnie Yankaskas has spent 15 years running the Carolina Mammography Registry, a database of mammogram data used to better breast cancer screening.

Last summer, campus officials discovered a server holding much of that information had been breached. Yankaskas was blamed, her rank reduced from full to associate professor and her salary cut nearly in half.

She's not going without a fight, though. Yankaskas believes she's not responsible for the security breach and wants her job back.

Here's her story.

Dr. Lisa Sanders, a Yale School of Medicine internist and technical
medical advisor on Fox's hit show "House," will speak at UNC on
Wednesday.

"House," which debuted in 2004 and stars Hugh Laurie, was
inspired by Sanders' monthly New York Times Magazine column
"Diagnosis," which Sanders had been writing since 2002. Sanders met with show creator and writer David Shore to develop the storyline for the pilot, and still consults with the show's writers and producers at the beginning of each season. 

A hacker who wormed into a UNC Chapel Hill computer server may not have gotten access to as much information as officials originally feared.

UNC School of Medicine officials said last week that a security breach had left data related to as many as 236,000 women enrolled in a mammography study exposed, including 163,000 social security numbers.

But now school officials say the number of exposed files is actually about 160,000 total, including about 114,000 social security numbers, said Stephanie Crayton, a UNC Health Care spokeswoman.

"As we're getting knee-deep into the investigation, we're finding the numbers coming down," she said.

The intrusion was detected in July but may have occurred as far back as 2007. A hacker got into the Carolina Mammography Registry, a 14-year-old UNC medical school research project that stores and analyzes mammogram information submitted by radiologists across the state.

The medical school set up a special phone line for people to call with questions. By mid-week, that line had received several dozen calls from women enrolled in the study, officials said.

The number is 877-434-3065 and is staffed from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

At the UNC Chapel Hill School of Medicine, a hacker got into a server that held research data including the social security numbers of 163,000 women who have allowed their mammograms to be included in a statewide registry.

The attack may have occurred as long ago as 2007, and med school officials just discovered the breach in late July. They've scrambled since to figure out what happened.

Here's the story.