When Scientists Go Bad - The Ramifications of Ethical Lapses

For opposing views check out some Autism sites. Also check out CDCs (Center for Disease Control) cover up of the link between vaccines and Autism. Autism is a fate WORSE than death.

I don't know why we think scientists so above reproach. Anyone can be "had" if the price is right...money, prestige, a plaque on a wall, etc.

Thank God, though, that most scientists are highly ethical individuals.

As for autism, there's so much anecdotal evidence the old "where there's smoke there's fire" analogy is called to mind.

One has to balance the chance of autism versus the far more likely chance of catching the disease.

Let them stay out of politics and present the information. They still are humans and will make mistakes/fudge things. That's a reason why I fear the ones screaming crisis in order to get increased budgets. I'm glad they caught this guy, there are more of them out there too unfortunately.

Ann - Autism is a very difficult challenge, true. I'm not sure what CDC cover-up to which you refer. The CDC makes the following statement:

"Is there a relationship between vaccines and autism?

Many studies have looked at whether there is a relationship between vaccines and autism. The weight of the evidence indicates that vaccines are not associated with autism. But CDC knows that some parents and others may still have concerns about this issue. CDC is committed to protecting the health of children and to identifying the biological and environmental causes of autism and other developmental disabilities, so we will continue to study the role of vaccines. Click here to view a chart of CDC’s studies about vaccines and ASDs."

Sometimes smoke is just smoke. Obviously there are individuals who, being human, have foibles. And some even are deceitful and criminal.

But I can tell you that "Anyone can be "had" if the price is right...money, prestige, a plaque on a wall, etc." is categorically not true. Scientists rarely fall into the lists of the wealthiest people on the planet. See some of the other threads here on Gather about the lack of funding for science.

Is competition in the real world built in to the race, an enactment of the race to be the sperm that fertilizes mom's ova? Most humans want to excell and some will use any and all means to achieve their spot in the limelight. Everything's fair in love, war and I guess it just depends how you define "fair" and "war". Capitalism is the sparkplug to ignite competition, money greases not only the palms but the drive to power and success, positively and negatively. ??

Oh, dear... The Autism Conspiracy again. Sorry, Diane... but it just ain't so. There have been NO repeatable studies that showed ANY such link. I don't know what this guy was trying to prove, but all hed did was feed your paranoia, and guarantee that several thousand children would go unvaccinated.

You have just GOT to learn the concept of "relative risk." The risk of getting the much more common disease for which the vaccine is given would FAR outweigh the risk of 'catching' autism from the vaccine. I don't care HOW MANY uneducated mothers show up in front of pharmceutical companies and scream about the link - it just isn't there!

Yes it's a lot worse when scientists cook the books than businesspeople. People lose jobs when businesspeople do it; people lose lives when scientists do it.

David - I should clarify...I meant funding, not necessarily money to line pockets.

CA - Funding is clearly a big issue. I've addressed this somewhere else at length, and rather than bore everyone (again) I'll just say that research does tend to follow the funding. But not the results. People may change the subject they are studying (e.g., from studying the affect of pesticides on frog death to studying the affect of pesticides on frog endocrine disruption) because endocrine disruption is an issue that requires much more study and thus gets much more funding. [We've pretty much already gotten rid of stuff that obviously kills frogs directly] It does not, however, lead to "getting the results that the funder wants," especially when the funder is the US government. And as noted, individuals may not always retain their highest ethics (though everyone I know does), organizations and "consensus" virtually cannot fake the data.

Frank - I think all of us are competitive to some degree, otherwise we wouldn't ever get that job promotion or get that plumber's license or start that internet business, etc. But as a rule wouldn't you say that you are ethical, and the members of your family, and your friends, and your plumber, and etc? Don't the vast majority of us hold ourselves to a high ethical standard?

Chuck - One of the ramifications of this particular doctor's actions is that many people got sick from measles that shouldn't have, and at least two people died. On top of that, many parents of autistic children blamed themselves for taking their children to get vaccinated, even though in truth the vaccination had nothing to do with their children getting autism.

It does not, however, lead to "getting the results that the funder wants," especially when the funder is the US government.

Unfortunately, there is a portion of the country (Republicans...cough...cough) that feel the government should not be involved in any scientific funding and that private enterprise should shoulder it. Of course, when we leave all scientific query to private enterprise, we get 4000 treatments for acne and balding, because that is where the money is, and almost nothing for things like malaria that (while not a major threat in the U.S.) kills tens of thousands of people worldwide each year.

Oh, Julie, you summarized exactly the reason that medical care should be considered a "common" - like our interstate highways, electric power grid.

The biggest argument against the government not funding science is because some people don't understand how important education is to this country.

I have to agree with you, at least mostly, Melinda. Funding for things that don't have immediate impacts, like basic research, tend to be high on the list of "discretionary" items cut when times are tough. But then, they are always tough. So in times that are not "extraordinarily tough" (which I would consider the present time to be), prioritization for government funding becames an ideological issue. Somehow we can find money for tax breaks for companies making multibillion dollar profits, but not the money for education, science, infrastructure, etc.

The thing that bothers me, besides the obvious deceit, is that the Lancet didn't catch on. Even moreso, the paper had a total of 13 authors, none of whom challenged the veracity of the conclusions enough to stop publication (in all fairness, none of the others was involved in the actual data analysis or writing of the paper; as is often the case, there was a team of people doing all the lab work that ot included as authors; ten of the 13 have recanted the paper's conclusions).

Even if I believed there was a link between vacines and autism, which I don't, my kids would still be vacinated. Because having autism is bad, but dead is worse.

Would you post this to Pain In The Neck? I'd like to feature it, I think it's important.
Thank you

Done. Thanks Elizabeth.

"Don't forget David, with peer reviewed journals like that, it's not typically their editorial staff that does the reviewing. They send it out to people that review for them. They depend on their reviewers. So, if the reviewer thought it was sound, they took their word."

Agreed. I've peer-reviewed dozens of scientific papers and it strikes me that there is no real way to know if the raw data have been manufactured just from the manuscript. It's up to the systems in the lab, hospital, researchers, etc. to make sure that everything is doucumented. The peer review isn't an audit, its a review by other experts to determine if the presented information makes sense and is suported by the evidence provided.

Well, this is always a shame. Thanks for the report, though I'm sorry to know it has happened (again).

However, I completely dispute the claim that people don't die when businessmen cook the books, only when scientists do (and medical doctors aren't necessarily scientists, anyway). What was going on in China with melamine? Businessmen were saving money and cheating their customers and poisoning the public. Similar things have happened in every country. Every heard of a building that fell down because substandard materials were used? That's white collar murder if someone dies. These comments are not, of course, a defense of scientists or doctors who falsify anything.

As for autism and vaccines, there are a couple of salient points that many "activists" don't want to admit (this is coming from someone who is an activist on many issues). The most obvious to me is that autism existed before vaccines were invented, so vaccines can't be the only cause, if they are a cause at all. So, who or what else is to blame?

The other point is the huge number of vaccinations given globally vs. the small number of adverse reactions (some of which include death or brain damage from fever, but none of which may involve autism, it isn't clear to me one way or the other). It is hard to prove that a child wouldn't have been autisitic anyway, though that will probably change some day, with genetic research, and people won't feel any better. People may feel worse, though they shouldn't, because the answer is most likely in the genes of the parents, at least more frequently than anywhere else. If you think that is a random, baseless claim, try reading the books of the English writer Nick Hornby, who is father to two autistic sons with two different mothers. Spend some time with his thoughts as he ponders this when he can't sleep, and writes about it.

The same type of risk that vaccines have exists with almost anything we consume as food or medicine- there is almost always a (very) small population of people capable of going into toxic shock from say, wheat gluten, or peanuts, or maybe vaccines, or aspirin, or penicillin, or...

I think that a lot of the anti-vaccine rage is simply a need to point a finger at something to explain a tragic event that we don't really know how to explain. Does that mean I'm cold-hearted and unsympathetic? No, it means I'm glad my kids didn't get polio or die from something else. Does that mean that I don't believe people have bad, even fatal reactions to vaccines? No, I just said it happens, in a paragraph above. However, a whole lot more people would be dying, or suffering from polio, without our most important vaccines. Of course, when statistics come home to and take shape for individual families, individual cases, they are tragic, and most of us probably have some personal experience in that arena, unfortunately.

My approach to the vaccine safety issue doesn't mean that we can relax our safety studies or diminish our scrutiny of new vaccines, but it certainly doesn't mean we should stop vaccinating.

thanks for sharing

Always happy to share, Larry

"It is hard to prove that a child wouldn't have been autisitic anyway,..."

Regarding this point, in this particular study virtually all of the children had already shown signs of autism long before they got the vaccine. For the one or two for whom signs weren't observed until afterwards, it was several months down the road, not "within one to three days" after vaccination as the published study had claimed.

And as you say, autism existed before vaccinations. No increases in rates of autism occurred immediately after the MMR vaccination program started (worldwide), which one certainly would have expected if autism were tied to MMR use.

By the way, this doesn't mean we shouldn't be vigilant or ignore evidence when it occurs. The thalidomide case is a good example of unintended consequences. But in that case it was unrecognized longer term effects. In the case noted in my article above, it was fraud on the part of the doctor for personal financial gain. This is why most scientists are required to "show their work" and also reveal any potential conflict of interests.

"However, a whole lot more people would be dying, or suffering from polio, without our most important vaccines. Of course, when statistics come home to and take shape for individual families, individual cases, they are tragic, and most of us probably have some personal experience in that arena, unfortunately."

Very well said, James.

I think much of the brouhaha comes from not understanding where we were before vaccines. Just a hundred years ago, people could expect to lose half their children to polio or measles or scarlet fever or smallpox. Half. My grandfather had ten siblings. Six made it to adulthood. If you think autism is more frightening than that, you've never had to bury a child.

People who abuse their authority and promote lies as science get no truck with me, no sympathy, no compassion. Those deaths are their responsibility as are the deaths still to come from others who have panicked themselves into leaving their children vulnerable.

When people lie to suit their own purposes, people can always die (think peanut company that refused to acknowledge Salmonella detected). But the implecations when a scientist is unethical go way beyond the actual situation. All scientists become suspect as a rule, despite the steps (which worked eventually here) in place to preclude this behavior. The harm done here will have ramifications in every branch of science and more people will die and suffer as a result of scientists who weren't listened to as well as those that listened to this one. And that's the real tragedy.

scarey stuff no matter how you look at it.

I was just telling a coworker the same thing Stephanie. People had large families in part because it was common for children to die before reaching adulthood (and often mothers died in childbirth). So many diseases have been "beaten" because of vaccines.

And I agree with your distain for people who "fake it." Scientists are people just like anyone else, and sometimes one "goes off the ranch." And it reflects badly on the rest of the scientists who are supremely ethical. It is painful to see something like this.

Thanks for the great article David. I am also very troubled by the activism of anti-vaccine people. There is a real and serious danger, if anti vaccine takes on the ferver and popularity of, for example anti GMO fever, that we will be overcome with a new wave of deadly and preventable diseases. A stong pro vaccine educational effort will be required.

I believe it is the admixture of non scientific interests, economic, political or whatever into biomedical science that should be firmly rooted out of science. All too many of us (scientists) have not adequately addressed this issue in our own work. And in environmental science, it can be a problem.

I agree with you, Sy. As painful as it is to see someone fake data, it's even more painful to see the effect it has on an already untrusting public. This is one of the things that was touched on in my other recent post about Pielke's "Honest Broker" book, how active should scientists be in ensuring that their science isn't abused?

David

I have been involved in a number of ways in the whole anti fraud issue, including writing guidelines for the training of young scientists. It is not an issue that is ignored or dismissed by scientists. There is not much worse than scientific fraud, since it can cause serious effects including death, and it is terribly disruptive to normal science. I dont know if the punishments are severe enough

Sy - When I hear people saying "scientists are all in it for the money" or "stuck in group think" I altenatively want to laugh and cry. There is so much pressure to keep a high ethic, and so many chances for others to check your work, it just is frustrating when something like this happens. And as you say, it could have important consequences, such as this case had on the incidence of measles.

You want to know the ramifications? Check here. This gentleman has devoted his site to "bad science", i.e. largely misrepresentive media misuse.

Thank you for the link Stephanie. For those who haven't already, please read the article at Stephanie's link. Pay special attention to the graphs of the increased incidence of mumps, measles and rubella.