Allegations of Fake Research Hit New High

[Guest guest]

" Zeus " <info

Allegations of Fake Research Hit New High

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 11:49:24 +0100

 

 

Allegations of Fake Research Hit New High

By MARTHA MENDOZA, AP National WriterSun Jul 10, 8:29 AM ET

 

Allegations of misconduct by U.S. researchers reached record highs last

year as the Department of Health and Human Services received 274

complaints - 50 percent higher than 2003 and the most since 1989 when

the federal government established a program to deal with scientific

misconduct.

 

Chris Pascal, director of the federal Office of Research Integrity, said

its 28 staffers and $7 million annual budget haven't kept pace with the

allegations. The result: Only 23 cases were closed last year. Of those,

eight individuals were found guilty of research misconduct. In the past 15

years, the office has confirmed about 185 cases of scientific misconduct.

 

Research suggests this is but a small fraction of all the incidents of

fabrication, falsification and plagiarism. In a survey published June 9 in

the journal Nature, about 1.5 percent of 3,247 researchers who responded

admitted to falsification or plagiarism. (One in three admitted to some

type of professional misbehavior.)

 

On the night of his 12th wedding anniversary, Dr. Andrew Friedman was

terrified.

 

This brilliant surgeon and researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital and

Harvard Medical School feared that he was about to lose everything - his

career, his family, the life he'd built - because his boss was coming

closer and closer to the truth:

 

For the past three years, Friedman had been faking - actually making up -

data in some of the respected, peer-reviewed studies he had published in

top medical journals.

 

" It is difficult for me to describe the degree of panic and irrational

thought that I was going through, " he would later tell an inquiry panel at

Harvard.

 

On this night, March 13, 1995, he had been ordered in writing by his

department chair to clear up what appeared to be suspicious data.

 

But Friedman didn't clear things up.

 

" I did something which was the worst possible thing I could have done, " he

testified.

 

He went to the medical record room, and for the next three or four

hours he

pulled out permanent medical files of a handful of patients. Then, covered

up his lies, scribbling in the information he needed to support his study.

 

" I created data. I made it up. I also made up patients that were

fictitious, " he testified.

 

Friedman's wife met him at the door when he came home that night. He wept

uncontrollably. The next morning he had an emergency appointment with his

psychiatrist.

 

But he didn't tell the therapist the truth, and his lies continued for 10

more days, during which time he delivered a letter, and copies of the

doctored files, to his boss. Eventually he broke down, admitting first to

his wife and psychiatrist, and later to his colleagues and managers, what

he had been doing.

 

Friedman formally confessed, retracted his articles, apologized to

colleagues and was punished. Today he has resurrected his career, as

senior

director of clinical research at Ortho-McNeil Pharmaceutical Inc., a

Johnson & Johnson company.

 

He refused to speak with the Associated Press. But his case, recorded in a

seven-foot-high stack of documents at the Massachusetts Board of

Registration in Medicine, tells a story of one man's struggle with power,

lies and the crushing pressure of academia.

 

Some other cases have made headlines:

 

_On July 18, Eric Poehlman, once a prominent nutrition researcher, will be

sentenced in federal court in Vermont for fabricating research data to

obtain a $542,000 federal grant while working as a professor at the

University of Vermont College of Medicine. He faces up to five years in

prison. Poehlman, 49, made up research between 1992 and 2000 on issues

like

menopause, aging and hormone supplements to win millions of dollars in

grant money from the federal government. He is the first researcher to be

permanently barred from ever receiving federal research grants again.

 

In 2001, while he was being investigated, Poehlman left the medical school

and was awarded a $1 million chair in nutrition and metabolism at the

University of Montreal, where officials say they were unaware of his

problems. He resigned in January when his contract expired.

 

_In March, Dr. Gary Kammer, a Wake Forest University rheumatology

professor

and leading lupus expert, was found to have made up two families and their

medical conditions in grant applications to the National Institutes of

Health. He has resigned from the university and has been suspended from

receiving federal grants for three years.

 

_In November, 2004, federal officials found that Dr. Ali Sultan, an

award-winning malaria researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health,

had plagiarized text and figures, and falsified his data - substituting

results from one type of malaria for another - on a grant application for

federal funds to study malaria drugs. When brought before an inquiry

committee, Sultan tried to pin the blame on a postdoctoral student. Sultan

resigned and is now a faculty member at Weill Cornell Medical College in

Qatar, according to a spokeswoman there.

 

While the cases are high-profile, scientists have been cheating for

decades.

 

In 1974, Dr. William Summerlin, a top-ranking Sloan-Kettering Cancer

Institute researcher, used a marker to make black patches of fur on white

mice in an attempt to prove his new skin graft technique was working.

 

His case prompted Al Gore, then a young Democratic congressman from

Tennessee, to hold the first congressional hearings on the issue.

 

" At the base of our involvement in research lies the trust of American

people and the integrity of the scientific exercise, " said Gore at the

time. As a result of their hearings, Congress passed a law in 1985

requiring institutions that receive federal money for scientific research

to have some system to report rulebreakers.

 

" Often we're confronted with people who are brilliant, absolutely

incredible researchers, but that's not what makes them great scientists.

It's the character, " said Debbi Gilad, a research compliance and integrity

officer at the University of California, Davis, which has taken a lead on

handling scientific misconduct.

 

David Wright, a Michigan State University professor who has researched why

scientists cheat, said there are four basic reasons: some sort of mental

disorder; foreign nationals who learned somewhat different scientific

standards; inadequate mentoring; and, most commonly, tremendous and

increasing professional pressure to publish studies.

 

His inability to handle that pressure, Friedman testified, was his

downfall.

 

" And it was almost as though you're on a treadmill that starts out slowly

and gradually increases in speed. And it happens so gradually you don't

realize that eventually you're just hoping you don't fall off, " he told a

magistrate during a state hearing in 1995. " You're sprinting near the end

and taking it all you can not to fall off. "

 

At the time he started cheating, Friedman was in his late 30s, married and

a father of two young children. Following the path of his father,

grandfather and uncle who were all doctors and medical researchers, he was

an associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology

at Harvard Medical School and chief of the department of reproductive

endocrinology at Brigham and Women's Hospital.

 

His reputation was tremendous and his work groundbreaking. His 30-page

resume highlighted numerous awards and honors, lectures in Canada, Europe

and Australia, and more than 150 articles, book chapters, reviews and

abstracts. Of those, 58 were original research articles, where he had

designed studies, conducted clinical trials, enrolled patients, collected

and analyzed data and made conclusions.

 

In the end, investigators found - and Friedman confessed - to making up

information for three separate journal articles (one of them never

published) involving hormonal treatment of gynecological conditions.

 

He testified that he was working 80 to 90 hours a week, seeing

patients two

days a week, doing surgery one day a week, supervising medical residents,

serving on as many as 10 different committees at the hospital and the

medical school and putting on national medical conferences.

 

He did seek help, both from a psychiatrist, who counseled him to cut back,

and from his boss, who demanded Friedman increase his research and refused

to reduce Friedman's patient load.

 

As good as Friedman was as a doctor, surgeon and researcher, he was

actually a lousy cheater. One thing that brought about his demise, in

fact,

was that the initials he used for fictitious patients were the same as

those of residents and faculty members in his program.

 

Unlike many scientists who file immediate lawsuits when they're caught,

Friedman was repentant, resigning from his positions at both Brigham and

Women's, and Harvard.

 

In 1996, Friedman agreed to be excluded for three years from working on

federally funded research. During the next three years he consulted with

drug companies, he paid a $10,000 fine to the state of Massachusetts and

surrendered his medical license for a year, became very active with the

American Red Cross, donating more than 500 hours, and attended several

lectures on ethics and record-keeping.

 

" Andy can never undo the damage that his actions have caused. However, he

has paid the price - his academic career is ruined, his reputation

sullied,

and his personal shame unremitting, " wrote Dr. Charles Lockwood, then

chair

of obstetrics and gynecology at New York University School of Medicine, in

a letter on Friedman's behalf.

 

In 1999, after successfully petitioning to get his license reinstated, he

went to work as director of women's health care at Ortho-McNeil

Pharmaceuticals. The job, which he still has, involves designing and

reviewing clinical trials for hormonal birth control, writing package

insert labels and lecturing to doctors. Lately he's appeared on television

and in newspaper articles responding to concerns about the safety of the

birth control patch.

 

Mary Anne Wyatt, a retired biochemist in Natick, Mass., is one of several

former patients.

 

" I think it's not at all surprising that a drug company would hire

somebody

who is very comfortable with hiding the effects of very dangerous drugs, "

said Wyatt, who unsuccessfully sued him.

 

Ortho-McNeil spokeswoman Bonnie Jacobs said the company was well aware of

Friedman's history when it hired him. " He is an excellent doctor, an asset

to our company, " she said.

 

forwarded by

Zeus Information Service

Alternative Views on Health

www.zeusinfoservice.com