Did a celebrated researcher obscure a baby's poisoning?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
> “I don’t know what happened in that house, on that night, but I do know that someone gave this baby crushed Tylenol-3,” likely mixed in breast milk or formula. “That’s the only way these numbers make sense.”
Does no one care that this is potentially a murder case?
The scientific case about infant opioid poisoning in general is a separate issue, of course. But assigning blame in this particular case doesn't have any bearing on that.
It's probably true that without a chance of conviction, standard protocol dictates that public resources should not be expended on reopening the investigation. But I was also heavily distracted while reading the article, scanning optimistically for the happy (under the circumstances) ending where justice is served. I certainly don't think there is "no benefit to anybody".
https://abcnews.go.com/US/exclusive-undercover-dhs-tests-fin...
Cold cases might get reopened because of advances in technology or other changes over time.
Unless you find some unforeseeable smoking gun any conviction will necessarily be questionable at best. That doesn't really serve much of a purpose beyond saying "we're the prosecutor's office, look how bad ass we are, look how we somehow manage to convict someone decades later, fear us". Never mind the fact that dredging this stuff up is not likely to be good for the family and that odds are all of these deaths are purely accidental/negligent so it's not like you're going after a "real criminal".
> odds are all of these deaths are purely accidental/negligent
How can you say that given that the article presents evidence that
> "... someone gave this baby crushed Tylenol-3,” likely mixed in breast milk or formula
Is that an accident according to you, or do you have any evidence that the article is wrong about that conclusion?
>How can you say that given that the article presents evidence that
Take a freakin step back and look at the big picture. Someone lost their kid, their first kid FFS. Even if a crime was technically committed along the way call it time served.
On a technical level, this is almost certainly not chargeable as a murder. Evidince of intent is lacking and almost certainly does not exist. The best you might be able to do is some negligent wrongful death manslaughter type thing, exact details depending on how such things are defined in the jurisdiction. Just based on plausibility these cases are almost certainly accidents. Very few mothers or the people around them murder newborns in the jurisdictions we're talking about. So if you did find intent, like a text exchange or something, the best you're likely to do is prove intent in the exact opposite direction and that no harm was meant. So then you have to prove negligence or something, which is also likely to be uphill. And this all assumes you can pin it on one person.
No good purpose is served by this. You're not getting some hardened criminal off the streets or putting someone in jail for an act committed with a bad frame of mind. Best case you wind up punishing someone using some negligince wrongful death type statues that's written based on the assumption that the person who caused the death DGAF about the deceased. Even if you pull that off this person is probably the mother or father or a grandparent who already lost their kid or grandkid for it so there's a real tinge of double jeopardy to the whole thing. This serves no purpose other than a show of force by the prosecuting office. The "real" crime committed here is not accidentally giving one's infant the wrong pills (someone gave a kid Tylenol, it's not like it was Xanax or booze to shut them up or some other thing everyone knows you don't do), the facts are likely to stack up in a way that make that act a non-criminal accident. So what you're doing in practice is screwing up one or more people's lives, to much fanfare, because they failed to tell the whole truth to the state a decade or more ago. Now, I get that that might sound like a good thing to some people, but those people are bad people and their ideas are bad ideas.
>Is that an accident according to you, or do you have any evidence that the article is wrong about that conclusion?
Stop trying to re-frame my assertion as an issue with the article rather than a critique of the proposed action (prosecuting someone). I know you'd rather discuss that, because that's much more defensible than a hypothetical decision to prosecute, and I do not accept your slight of hand.
> this person is probably the mother or father or a grandparent who already lost their kid or grandkid
Would you say the same about a man who (perhaps accidentally) killed his wife 20 years ago and covered it up? "He's already lost his wife, time served, no reason to investigate."
Speaking as a parent, giving a 12 days old infant Tylenol is clearly absurd and just as unreasonable as giving them booze.
There is a massive gulf of intent there and I think it speaks volumes that you cannot (or worse, decline to) identify it.
>Speaking as a parent,
And also speaking as a person who's been espousing the opinions you've been espousing thus far, that's more than just "parent"
>giving a 12 days old infant Tylenol is clearly absurd and just as unreasonable as giving them booze.
People are stupid. Shit happens. I know it seems wild now and everyone turns into a screeching moron about it now but the "suck on a finger dipped in booze" thing was not abnormal (note for said screeching morons: I did not say "considered tasteful") for decades. Doesn't surprise me that someone would give an infant a fraction of a pill of Tylenol as a sleep aid not knowing they have the opioid type and that the fraction they chose is enough to kill the kid one shot.
Note that this is just a story you made up, we really don't know what happened. You're also leaving out that if somebody did this by accident, they also chose to keep quiet about it for 20 years. Doesn't that speak about "intent"?
Also, giving a 12 days old baby a "normal" Tylenol, say one with 500 mg acetaminophen, is a very bad idea. The normal dose for a 3 month old is 60 mg (for fever, not as a "sleep aid"). Doses above 200 mg/kg can cause acute toxicity, so for a slightly small baby of 2500 g, you're there already. Perhaps thinking that there's a "safe" type of Tylenol to give a baby as a "sleep aid" (what??) is a good example of "People are stupid".
With my example with the wife, I'm simply trying to establish why you seem to consider children (or rather babies) to be not worthy of the same justice as adults. How about an adult who accidentally kills their elderly parent, would you consider that worth investigating, or should it also not be investigated on the principle of "they lost their parent"? Or further, at what age do you no longer consider it morally justifiable to accidentally (or otherwise) kill one's child and cover it up? 5 years old, 10, 18?
To me, being stupid does not mean you're allowed to give your elderly father 10 Tylenols as a "sleep aid" and claim "shit happens" if he dies. I might want to call a person of that viewpoint a "bad person with bad ideas" or a "screeching moron", but I'd like to stay above such childish namecalling.
When I tried reading into the causes of so-called SIDS it seemed like at least some of the cases were a catch-all diagnosis that included cases where parents inadvertently killed their infants (eg co-sleeping and rolling onto them). Fundamentally I think there often isn't much upside to fully fleshing out the truth of cases where parents have already paid the heaviest price.
While "happy" isn't the word I'd use, that seems better than knowing that this could happen to any baby at any time and nothing would be done.
My daughter, as a baby, always managed to find a way to sleep on her stomach. Wouldn't sleep on her back, but almost magically by comparison would fall asleep lying on her stomach (face to one side or the other, not straight down, obviously - I hope). We tried various combinations of devices, arrangements of pillows and cushions, tight wraps, to keep her lying on her back, but babies are remarkably, if involuntarily, wilful (or she was, anyway, and remains to this day).
I worry about very few things, but for the first few nights we'd regularly get up to check on her, and literally be holding our breath waiting for her to expel hers.
Out of necessity the every-parents-SIDS-fear, from allowing the baby to sleep on their stomach, had to be removed from our psyche so that we could continue to function day-to-day.
Said baby is now, thankfully, a semi-healthily functional teenager. As functional as teenagers get anyway :)
It's understandable that they're trying to help the people who might not be the most competent at following the guidelines, because there is still harm reduction to be had there. But it pushes the instruction-followers into the territory of "well, this probably doesn't apply to us because XXX", which is an epistemologically terrible place to be.
We're still joking about how much they repeated the advice to keep the belly button dry, when it was relevant for like maybe two whole weeks.
https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety...
> However, since immunizations are given to about 90 percent of children less than 1 year of age, and about 1,600 cases of SIDS occur every year, it would be expected, statistically, that every year about 50 cases of SIDS will occur within 24 hours of receipt of a vaccine. However, because the incidence of SIDS is the same in children who do or do not receive vaccines, we know that SIDS is not caused by vaccines.
Consider an unrelated hypothetical scenario, a family father accidentally hits and kills somebody with his car. He flees from the scene and is not discovered for 20 years. Would you then not attempt to prosecute him because it would be sad for his family to know? And now consider the case if it was his own child that died.
But really my main issue was with characterizing such a thing as a "happy ending". While it's generally good for justice to be served, we should still be wary of people who are a bit too gleeful about punishment.
The benefit would be to formally reject the fake science that was used to close the investigation the first time. A conviction is beside the point.
Did we read the same article? Why are you so quick to jump the gun here?
> Koren obtained a sample of Rani’s breast milk, which she had kept in her freezer. His lab measured its morphine concentration at eighty-seven nanograms per millilitre.
If this is in the breastmilk, it will end up in the stomach, and it may end up in gastric contents. I don't understand this urge to demonize the parents, who on top of having lost a child, have to stand these witchtrials.
From the article I read:
"A twelve-day-old infant cannot crawl. It cannot grab, and it cannot put something into its own mouth. “It also cannot swallow a Tylenol-3 pill,” Juurlink told me. “I don’t know what happened in that house, on that night, but I do know that someone gave this baby crushed Tylenol-3,” likely mixed in breast milk or formula. “That’s the only way these numbers make sense.”"
> Recently, Parvaz Madadi has undergone a painful process of revisiting her past work and memories. [...] She added that she had no confidence in the measurement of Rani’s breast-milk sample, because it had been handled by Koren’s lab.
There is a lot to process in this long article. The quote selected by 'steelbrain, concerning Koren's measurement occurs very, very early on, and much of the rest of the article is about contrasting Koren's early presentations of the material against others' testimony. It's worth reading the whole thing
To 'steelbrain: cherry-picking one single quote out of a nuanced article does the journalism here a dire disservice. It's okay for different people to have different beliefs and takeaways from the article. However, your own defense of the biological mechanism here is directly argued against in the "same article" you are admonishing others over reading. That is not conducive to a discussion in good faith.
Furthermore, Koren lied about what the tests showed the stomach contents to be: he omitted codeine entirely. Codeine (per the article) would not be expected to be transferred by breastmilk -- it's metabolized into morphine to be effective.
There are some giant red flags with this situation. How awful.
Note that you and GP are talking about different values of "this." GP is talking about codeine, you're talking about morphine. The difference between the two is at the crux of this article.
It appears that they didn't really read the article before commenting.
The entire point, the damning evidence is that the child that died had codeine in his stomach, which he absolutely couldn't get from breast milk.
Neither the article nor the commenter you replied to has demonized the parents. Yes, both the evidence discussed in the article and the opinions of those interviewed indicate direct administration of a pharmaceutical; it is appropriate to discuss this. Nobody has pointed the finger at anyone; it would indeed be quite inappropriate for such a discussion to be held in this forum.
87 ng/mL.
Baby eats 30mL per hour. That's 2.6 micrograms of morphine.
Elimination half life in neonates of ~8 hours means 30 micrograms in system at equilibrium if constantly fed this and the baby absorbs all of it (takes 4-5 half lives to get to that) and pharmacokinetics are linear. In reality a neonate likely absorbs well under 1/3rd, so you'd expect under 10 micrograms in equilibrium.
25-50 micrograms/kilogram is normal dosing of morphine in a neonate when it is necessary, every 6 hours (resulting in a peak systemic concentration of ~60-120 ug/kg after repeated dosing).
Compare -- 60-120 ug/kg therapeutic dosing to 10 micrograms in the neonate's body (3-4 kilos, so 3 ug/kg??)
And then, you end up with acetaminophen and codeine in the neonate's stomach, with no morphine... Even though these do not end up in breast milk in significant quantities.
I'd say, a very low chance of murder, and a near-certainty of at least manslaughter (unintentional killing), with a zero chance of prosecution due to lack of evidence.
Plus, I hardly see any value of jailing any of the caregivers for this. Whether an investigation should be made, I don't disagree.
>But the forensic-toxicology laboratory’s measurements showed that his acetaminophen concentration was in the range of what you’d expect to find in a baby’s bloodstream soon after he’d been administered a standard dose.
>“I am familiar with patients whose babies have died after a caregiver gave the opiate directly.”
Maybe the person thought the tylenol-3 would help the baby.
It's possible the person even thought "Tylenol-3, hmm, that must be another term for children's Tylenol, Tylenol for 3-year-olds. I've given that to babies before."
> “Oh, we made it up,” Rieder replied.
Interesting anecdote. Something to keep in mind.
Yup. This paper was a lesson in my genetics class (2017)
I know a thousand more things about cars then I will ever know about doctoring, which scares the hell out of me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraudulent_Lancet_MMR_vaccine-...
[2] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
But the Scientific Method is the only functional bullshit detection system we have. When it is allowed to work, science corrects itself and excises the falsehoods.
It’s a shame that outsized egos within The Lancet and other orgs are still very much in play.
The existence of fraudulent studies, dishonest researchers, the replication crisis, etc. does not invalidate science as an institution. It just means we need to be careful about distinguishing between individual opinions and the scientific consensus. We also need to keep in mind that the consensus is never 100% correct; it's always subject to change and we need to update our beliefs as new evidence comes in.
When citizen science is ridiculed and "the institution of science" is glorified this is what you get.
And anyone who dares to profess this, is a loony, a conspiracy theorist, an anti-scientific person, etc.
The main reason being scientific consensus can lag reality significantly, especially when career incentives discourage dissent. The history of science includes many cases where consensus was wrong and critics were marginalized rather than engaged.
Deference to science as an authority is the opposite.
Feynman has a quote on this:
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says, 'Science teaches such and such,' he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn't teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, 'Science has shown such and such,' you might ask, 'How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?' It should not be 'science has shown' but 'this experiment, this effect, has shown.' And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments — but be patient and listen to all the evidence — to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at."
skepticism is necessary, but not sufficient.
if they merely nay-say institutions and then go with their gut, it's certainly not.
only when someone attempts to rationally disprove a position, offering alternate testable theories and actually performing those tests is science done.
if you suspect an institution is wrong, that's fine, but it's just a hunch until someone does a test.
I think we've been pampered by a few hundred years of rapid "scientific advancement" and now we're firmly in the area where things are not grade-school science fair easy to see or prove.
Which is why one of the core tenets of practicing Science is “trust, but verify”.
Science is based on the trust of what came before.
But the fallible, ego-driven, and dishonest nature of humanity means that trust alone cannot be relied upon. Hence the “but verify”. That is why replication studies and falsification tests exist - to cull that which cannot be reliably replicated.
Unfortunately, capitalism has stepped in and f*ked up even that, when for-profit universities who rely on public funding place “publish or die” mandates on researchers. This makes any repeat experiments untenable because it takes researchers away from publishing new data. So they just cite prior papers and chase the latest shiny -- because their continued employment is predicated upon publishing.
We have perverse incentives in place that have distorted science, sure. And almost all of these distortions come directly down to a violently coercive economic system that forces you to be profitable to someone else least you suffer homelessness, destitution, and even death.
But what else is there? Belief in an insane, evil, and omnicidal sky-daddy?
Sorry, but no. We should counteract the sources of distortions by crushing capitalism and the corrosive influence of money, not switching over to systems that have always proven themselves to be supremely untrustworthy.
I was a witness of wrong prescribing medication by doctors many time. For example Novalgin for mother releasing from hospital after painful birth. This medicament is not suitable for breastfeeding mothers!
> and the scientific consensus
We can only have "scientific consensus" in maths (and even there there are doubts), every other science is a social science if one digs hard enough. Even particle physics.
The best media representation I've seen of this process is the youtube channel Explosions&Fire, which attempts to replicate entertaining-looking chemistry papers. He's often mad at the authors of the papers he's using in any given episode, but following their breadcrumbs is still effective enough (compared to I guess mixing acids and stuff based on vibes?) that he keeps at it.
"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
The article here is very well written and does a great job of conveying the perspectives and opinions of many parties. I would recommend reading the article in spite of its headline.
"any comment that dismisses an article based on it's headline has no value"
For large publications like the New Yorker, it is an Editor, NOT THE AUTHOR who writes a headline.
Also, Koren may have been a "celebrated researcher" at some point but he's now disgraced.
To say that it doesn't apply here, I hope?
Spoiler: the "celebrated researcher" in the title was discovered to commit fraud on a massive scale, was stripped of his physician license, and had multiple articles recalled.
He absolutely did obscure a baby's poisoning.
But that's not the main point of the article, nor is the story.
> Published in the print edition of the February 2, 2026, issue, with the headline “A Fatal Error.”What the actual fuck.