Duke Officials Silenced Med Student Who Reported Trouble in Anil Potti's Lab

http://www.cancerletter.com/articles/20150109_1

by Fede_V • 12 years ago

261 55 12 years ago

tokenadult• 12 years ago

The Retraction Watch blog maintained by two medical journalists has done some very interesting reporting about the Anil Potti case over the time that the case has been in the news.[1] For a while, Retraction Watch had to take down its blog entries about Potti because of a bogus DMCA takedown notice, but the blog posts have now been restored, and provide background to the interesting (and dismaying) story kindly submitted here.

[1] http://retractionwatch.com/?s=Anil+Potti

chris_wot• 12 years ago

Who filed the DMCA takedowns? Can we find out?

Buge• 12 years ago

Narendra Chatwal from NewsBulet.In

http://retractionwatch.com/2013/02/05/wordpress-removes-anil...

detaro• 12 years ago

An indian news site copied their posts and then DMCA'd their site:

http://retractionwatch.com/2013/02/05/wordpress-removes-anil...

Fede_V2• 12 years ago

What drives me absolutely crazy about the story is this:

"Duke officials admitted that mistakes were made, but didn’t respond to specific questions."

Note the passive tone. These are not junior people we are dealing with. These are very senior deans and professors that will face absolutely no accountability whatsoever for trying to cover up a case of serious misconduct - and the incredibly brave student that spoke out was threatened into silence.

It reminds me of the Schon scandal at Bell Labs. Again, someone faked a huge amount of data, and bosses were all too happy to put their names at the end of all the high impact papers he produced... yet again, when the fraud came to light, none of the bosses suffered absolutely any repercussion.

mathattack2• 12 years ago

What's criminal is that this impacted cancer trials. Yes, mistakes were made, and yes, people should go to jail for this.

dhimes• 12 years ago

Don't forget, somebody was possibly denied the job and his or her trajectory possibly changed because of this lying SOB.

spiritplumber• 12 years ago

You mean "jails should be filled" :) Hey two can play this game.

at-fates-hands• 12 years ago

You have to remember this is the same faculty who were at the heart of the Duke Lacrosse rape case and who went out of their way to publicly humiliate the players involved and even after they had been proven innocent, refused to retract their public statements on the case.

To me, this is about par for the course with the Duke Faculty members.

xacaxulu• 12 years ago

Luckily the DA responsible for that case was disgraced and disbarred. Looks like something similar should be in order for the current crop.

joliv• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_were_made

danielweber2• 12 years ago

It's amazing how some phrases that start out as completely negative eventually become valid excuses.

"Best and Brightest" is another phrase that took a weird turn. The original [1] use from the 1970s was entirely negative but people use it unironically these days.

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22best+and+br...

taylor-smith• 12 years ago

Go to hell Duke

debacle• 12 years ago

We have built an entire society of people who cannot see farther than their own noses.

And then we put them in positions of power.

comrh• 12 years ago

That is incredibly brave of Bradford Perez. So much on the line, in a position of very little power, and still followed his conscious. Whistleblowers are often very admirable.

hga8• 12 years ago

Only a bit. When push came to shove, he chose his career over stopping the fraud being used to (mis-)treat patients, who suffered for another couple of years, becuase he manifestly did not blow the whistle when Duke went into cover-up mode.

His 3rd year was already blown (and that sort of thing happens when you get in the lab of an incompetent†); instead of putting the interests of the patients first, he submitted a false affidavit to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in a go along, get along attempt to get funding to redo his 3rd year (I surmise from the article that he was unsuccessful).

I'd be a lot easier on him if this wasn't feeding into patient care at the same exact time he was reporting this. I don't insist every scientist who discovers "misconduct" do a Margaret O'Toole† and move from the lab to answering phones for her brother's moving company (Gentle Giant, they were great in the early '90s), but there was a lot more at stake than research that would get invalidated in due course as people tried to build upon it.

I suppose it's only fitting that currently his life is being turned upside down as a star witness for the inevitable lawsuits.

† I had a girlfriend who found it impossible to do undergraduate research (UROP) in Imanishi-Kari's lab, it was very poorly run. I doubt Imanishi-Kari committed fraud then, just shoddy, incorrect research, but per the Secret Service, the government's experts on paper and inks, she certainly did when the investigation got serious.

SolarNet2• 12 years ago

I think it's important to point to the best person in the room and say, be more like that guy. He may not be a paragon of scientific values, but at least he's well above the rest.

You're basically asking the junior developer to question all the senior developers, the lead developers, and the executive managers. There is only so many people a person can say are wrong. It's not possible for him to know everything, for all he knew he was wrong, and the professors were merely unwilling to take the time to explain it (or bring in an outside professor to explain it). That smelled wrong enough for him to get out, but he probably had a nagging thought in the back of his mind that he simply didn't understand.

Blackthorn• 12 years ago

He went above and beyond the call of duty in what he did. At some point the people whose job it is to actually handle matters like this, like the deans, need to act.

honksillet2• 12 years ago

I would think that he would have a case against Duke himself. 1) Likely had to pay another year of med school tuition, which is expensive. 2) Had to defer earning a salary for a year. 3) Having appeared to flame out of a research year, he may have found his residency options limited.

tsotha2• 12 years ago

Duke really hasn't covered itself in glory in recent years.

honksillet2• 12 years ago

What else have they done?

tsotha2• 12 years ago

I'm thinking of the lacrosse thing, where 88 faculty members publicly turned on four students without trying to figure out what the facts were.

pdevr• 12 years ago

In 2006, Potti et al. had published a revolutionary paper in Nature Medicine, proposing using genomic signatures to guide the use of chemotherapeutics.
Another Potti paper, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposed using genomics to assign early-stage lung cancer patients to treatment regimens.
In both cases, the reported scales of improvements were dramatic.

Academic papers about medical treatment affect life/death of millions. This is frightening.

ochoseis3• 12 years ago

I wonder if academic journals should be treated similarly to Linux distros (or other software projects really) where less proven/stable features are considered beta and published in journals like Arxiv (say, the Fedora to draw a Linux reference). Once the research has been proven or repeated, it can be published in more "stable" journal like NEJM or Nature. That way the original author still gets the credit, but you have more confidence that what you're reading in those stable journals is indeed truth.

hga8• 12 years ago

Problem is, a lot of this stuff is expensive to reproduce, and you certainly can't get a grant to do that, so what normally happens is either the research is so unimportant it's ignored (a product of publish or perish, I suppose from both sides), or if it's "high impact" enough, other labs try to build upon it. If the foundation is rotten, they'll figure that out soon enough, and at worst case word will filter through the grapevine.

pja• 12 years ago

Academic papers about medical treatment affect life/death of millions. This is frightening.

Absolutely. If you read "The Emperor of All Maladies" you'll discover that a single research lab led by a (probably) fraudulent research lead caused the US healthcare system to spend around a $billion on an aggressive cancer treatment that was no more effective than the existing one back in the 90s. The treatment was extremely invasive and very expensive: the patient was pushed to the edge of organ failure by extremely high doses of chemotherapy which required close management by nursing staff and had to have a bone marrow transplant after the drug regimen was completed because their bone marrow didn't survive. Needless to say, the side effects of this treatment were horrendous & since chemotherapy drugs are usually carcinogenic it's pretty much guaranteed that people who received it that would otherwise have survived died later on as a consequence.

As far as I know the researcher in question has never faced any real sanction for their actions. When the fraud came to light they quit their post & refused to talk to anyone about it ever again.

johnminter• 12 years ago

Keith Baggerly and Kevin Coombes of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center tried to replicate the work and were instrumental in getting the investigation going. They have a very helpful synopsis here: http://bioinformatics.mdanderson.org/Supplements/ReproRsch-A...

notlisted2• 12 years ago

Unfortunately, it's par for the course. There's a major problem in academia: there's too much to gain from publications of successful research ($$$, fame, citations). The result of all this data massaging is years of wasted research and millions (billions) of dollars chasing ghosts. (By the way: also in companies, but to a lesser extent)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/28/us-science-cancer-...

"A former researcher at Amgen Inc has found that many basic studies on cancer -- a high proportion of them from university labs -- are unreliable, with grim consequences for producing new medicines in the future.

During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 "landmark" publications -- papers in top journals, from reputable labs -- for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development. [...] Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. "

hga8• 12 years ago

I really want to think that this particular attempt at reproduction is not quite as bad as it sounds, because replicating this stuff can be very hard, depends on special reagents (cell lines, viri, etc. etc.)....

On the other hand, these are by definition high impact studies, ones Amgen wanted to try to develop drugs upon, and they wouldn't have gone public unless they were reasonably sure they'd given them a legitimate try. And I already assume at least 1/2 of biomedical research is junk ... and it wasn't just because I found organic chemistry easy and fun, I switched my major to chemistry in part because I didn't like the ... vibes, for lack of a better word, I got from the (MIT) biology department, aside from my adviser Phillip Sharp (who was clearly going to get a Nobel soon, and from solid research; Lord Baltimore, though ... did not impress).

notlisted2• 12 years ago

I'm not in biotech, but my wife is. The stories I could tell...

chrisbennet• 12 years ago

If the purpose of these science experiments is to "move the ball down the field" (add to the sum of human knowledge/science), wouldn't it be fair to say that if the results can't be duplicated by other scientists, then the original authors haven't succeeded in increasing human knowledge?

Shivetya• 12 years ago

This is mostly because there are little to no real repercussions when most of your funding is government originated. Oh you might end up with a lengthy investigation or such but the school won't lose funding, just funding for one avenue of research if at all. Likely they just get their wrists slapped and no one ever finds out

danielweber2• 12 years ago

OT, but if you screen is a certain multiple of pixels, the social media stuff on the left-hand side overlaps the text I am trying to read.

settsu3• 12 years ago

There's just something wrong with a system when a "a third-year medical student and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute scholar" is considered "lowly status."

Years of innovative thinking from highly intelligent individuals wasted by tenured illusions of grandeur and beaten into institutional submission to serve the status quo...

hga8• 12 years ago

Maybe.

Thing is, he's the equivalent of a grad student, which is the official place to start your apprenticeship in learning Science, which is what he was doing (see what he does praise the PI for). The only people in a lab who are lower in status are undergraduates and technicians.

settsu3• 12 years ago

I understand his educational status. But my point was, for example, dismissing an idea suggested by a child simply because the idea came from a child, not on a qualitative basis.

Clearly higher learning institutions can, have, and do serve an important role in modern society. As one would expect from a concentrated collection of intelligent, educated people.

Maybe it's not a new phenomenon and just indicative of the information age, but there seems to be a trend where they—large reputable institutions that would have previously been a source of innovative ideas—have become increasingly been a source of suppression (subjugation, even?) of enterprising, forward-thinkers who upset the status quo.

Estragon• 12 years ago

In the context of the University hierarchy, that is lowly status. There is absolutely no power associated with the position.

cowardlydragon2• 12 years ago

It's almost like higher learning institutions have been taken over by a class of people with little experience in research, teaching, or education...

Duke Officials Silenced Med Student Who Reported Trouble in Anil Potti's Lab

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