Duke Officials Silenced Med Student Who Reported Trouble in Anil Potti's Lab | Hacker News Reader

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

cancerletter.com

261 pointsFede_V55 comments

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.

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

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

I think everyone more or less agrees that Anil Potti is a disgrace to science, and he has been practically blacklisted from mainstream science.

What this article shows though, is that his bosses were directly involved in the cover up - and lied through their teeth about the lack of a whistleblower to the people who went through clinical trials based on made up data.

Now, Potti took the fall - what will happen to those people who tried to silence the whistle blower? I'm not suggesting they are as guilty as Potti, but if you are willing to share in the credit, you must be willing to take a portion of the blame when things turn sour.

If they are as guilty as the article suggests, they should go to jail too. Just losing your career isn't enough.

> if you are willing to share in the credit, you must be willing to take a portion of the blame when things turn sour

Ah...reminds me of a good Wire quote from Lieutenant Daniels: "You should never take credit when the crime rate drops, unless you want to take the blame when its rises."

Don't get caught.

And make sure there's no one above you when you do.

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

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.

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

It also seems par for the course to remove Durham DA's...Nifong's successor (Tracey Cline) eventually fell as well: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/20/d...

Also, for those who don't know the accuser was also later convicted on second-degree murder charges: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Mangum#Second-degree_mu...

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

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...

"Meritocracy" will always be my favorite.

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

Who filed the DMCA takedowns? Can we find out?

Narendra Chatwal from NewsBulet.In

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

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

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

What the hell. That's crazy.

I would not call it a news site. It is a cover-up job, I am not even sure if Narendra Chatwal even exists other than paper.

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. "

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).

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

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?

Well, it depends on the process. Normally when this sort of thing happens, those trying to build upon another's research will contact the lab that did it and try to figure out what's wrong.

My favorite professor, Jerry Lettvin, discovered a marvelous thing about frog's eyes: unlike/in addition to the basic edge detector sort of things we've got, they have a specific "bug detector", simulated in the lab with a bowl over the frog's head, and something black that's moved into the frog's vision via a magnet on the other side. And of course probe(s) in the optic nerve.

Another lab had difficultly reproducing this (this was seriously novel, and in theory easy and cheap to reproduce), so Jerry practiced for a while doing the procedure with side-cutters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagonal_pliers), and then showed up at that lab in his usual not clean shaven, simple and slightly dirty blue work shirt and black pants, and got the experiment to work with the lab's equipment (e.g. probe(s) and oscilloscope) ... and the side-cutters he brought ^_^.

(The frogs were, BTW, reported to apparently not be terribly hurt by this, and after healing up exhibited normal frog behavior. Then again, if I was in that lab, I'd be harvesting them for their tasty legs, as I did with all the bull frogs I shot with my BB gun growing up, in addition to dissecting them :-).

This is fairly common--if work is genuinely original there is likely a good deal of technique involved. There is a lot of laboratory science that is more like craft, and it's always been this way. Reproducibility of novel results should be expected to be poor, and getting to the point of reproduction will often be difficult.

So "failure to reproduce on the first few attempts" does not mean "bad science".

In genomics, however, failure to reproduce was the norm for many years. There were a few spectacularly good early results that held up, but the ubiquitous use of cross-validation (which unless done with insane care is simply invalid) and analysis of significance that was frequently just wrong meant that a lot of results were published that were the numerical equivalents of early Royal Society papers on deformed cows and the like: meticulous descriptions of anomalous one-offs.

A lot of what is happening is generational: the older generation of biological researchers were never trained or equipped with anything like the analytical tools required to cope with the large numerical datasets that labs started generating in the '90's thanks to new technologies in the wake of the Human Genome Project.

I have no problem with researchers claiming that their result only happens in a very narrow circumstance ... so long as the resulting drug is only FDA-approved for use in that specific circumstance ;-)

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

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.

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.

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.

Nope, what he found was very clear, enough that he felt compelled to remove his name from all that the laboratory was doing, in part to protect his reputation, and to completely abandon this attempt at his 3rd year in med school with no guarantee he'd get funding for a retry. He outlined this in a 3 page document that other uninvolved scientists have found very impressive, and that is clearly, along with his depositions providing a major foundation for the current legal case(s) (Duke has big pockets and very dirty hands, this is not going to end well for them). He was being very certain in my book.

There's also the responses of the PI and the PI's mentor. A real scientist doesn't take such questions as "a personal insult" as the now almost completely disgraced PI did (state medical boards that are desperate like North Dakota will still license the PI as a doctor, at last count). The PI's mentor wasn't that sort of unprofessional, but the article says he didn't respond well to this. Note also one of the Duke higher ups, apparently unprompted, introduced the word "misconduct" in all this.

If you're going to be a "life and death doctor" as I put it, for him one of the harshest examples of that, oncology, you're going to be making a lot of decisions that patients lives hinge on. A degree of certainty and decisiveness, what some call doctors' "God Complex", is required. I judge that he was sufficiently certain in his judgement of the research, and its implications for patients being treated based on it at the time. It's that last bit that I believe requires you to go above and beyond in determining if you're correct or not, and then doing what's right for the patients.

Ever hear of Imposter Syndrome? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

And for that matter it's inverse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

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.

He was training to be a doctor. One of those who takes the Hippocratic Oath to essentially "First do no harm". I expect more from doctors (and nurses; my mom was an RN, and I was close to some doctors for social and business reasons when I was in middle and high school).

It's the false affidavit that makes this crystal clear to me. He knew the situation was a lot worse than he stated in it---and note that at least as this article is framed, he allowed himself to be silenced.

You mom is an RN, which means she has a front row seat to modern medicine's comprehensive attempt to cut costs and hide its reduced level of care...

... yet she still goes to work, doesn't she, mr moral absolutist?

Reread my posting: "my mom was an RN"

She quit that career when she was pregnant with me, the eldest of 4, in 1960.

My relationship with those doctors ended when I went to college in 1979, and my family transitioned out of that business in the early '80s. So except what we read, and learn from and experience with our doctors, we're as out of touch with the modern medical scene. For that matter, since I'm disabled, and my parents are old, we're all on Medicare, which has it's own weird rules.

So, no front row seat.

I would say "nice try", except for the epic failure in reading comprehension in your rush to DISQUALIFY me.

Many / most doctors don't take the Hippocratic Oath. Amongst other things, the Oath forbids surgery.

A large number of doctors don't take -any- oath, as such.

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.

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...

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...

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.

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.

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

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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

What else have they done?

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.

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

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.

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.

Go to hell Duke

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