THE FINAL MELTDOWN OF PILTDOWN MEDICINE? We ended 2010 with the arsenic bug, a big story with a lot of entertainment value. We begin 2011 with an even bigger one, but there's nothing at all amusing about it.
Yesterday the British Medical Journal began publication of a series of articles on the discredited contention that the childhood vaccine against measles, mumps, and rubella causes autism. That claim, put forth in a 1998 Lancet paper, was not just wrong, the journal says. It was a bare-faced lie.
Investigative journalist Brian Deer, who has shown that the 1998 paper was an out-and-out deliberate fraud perpetrated for financial gain, likens the MMR vaccine/autism events to the notorious Piltdown Man hoax. (These fake fossils, you'll recall, purported to be the missing link between human and ape early in the 20th century, were not revealed as a fraud until 1953.) The nonexistent connection between childhood vaccination and autism, Deer says, was Piltdown medicine. Deer describes how he did his work here.
Medical journalism and other media attention may, one hopes, help anguished parents face up to the truth that their children are not autistic because of childhood vaccinations and that the cause(s) of autism are still unknown. If so, that might partly atone for the fact that medical journalism and other media attention played a substantial part in spreading this sorry story to begin with. Who doesn't love a David-and-Goliath tale, and many latched on to this one uncritically. Here was Andrew Wakefield, a lone-but-courageous researcher, and a hardy band of families suffering from a frightening disorder, who stoutheartedly arrayed themselves against Big Pharma, the Medical Establishment, and other forces of pro-vaccination evil. An irresistible story line.
Except that it was false, a deliberate fraud from beginning to end. And it's a fraud with grave consequences. Measles, which can cause lifelong disability and even death, had all but vanished from the UK, but now it is once again endemic. Investigations of the real causes of autism were starved of resources. The disorder remains a mystery partly because the vaccine claim was a hoax for profit.
In a series of articles starting this week, and seven years after first looking into the MMR scare, journalist Brian Deer now shows the extent of Wakefield’s fraud and how it was perpetrated (doi:10.1136/bmj.c5347). Drawing on interviews, documents, and data made public at the GMC hearings, Deer shows how Wakefield altered numerous facts about the patients’ medical histories in order to support his claim to have identified a new syndrome; how his institution, the Royal Free Hospital and Medical School in London, supported him as he sought to exploit the ensuing MMR scare for financial gain; and how key players failed to investigate thoroughly in the public interest when Deer first raised his concerns.
Deer
found that not one of the 12 cases reported in the 1998 Lancet paper was free of misrepresentation or undisclosed alteration, and that in no single case could the medical records be fully reconciled with the descriptions, diagnoses, or histories published in the journal.
The editorial goes on relentlessly:
Who perpetrated this fraud? There is no doubt that it was Wakefield. Is it possible that he was wrong, but not dishonest: that he was so incompetent that he was unable to fairly describe the project, or to report even one of the 12 children’s cases accurately? No. A great deal of thought and effort must have gone into drafting the paper to achieve the results he wanted: the discrepancies all led in one direction; misreporting was gross. Moreover, although the scale of the GMC’s 217 day hearing precluded additional charges focused directly on the fraud, the panel found him guilty of dishonesty concerning the study’s admissions criteria, its funding by the Legal Aid Board, and his statements about it afterwards.
A wealth of blogging is tumbling out, and it will fill you in far more completely than traditional media. Begin with my old friend and former colleague Joel Shurkin at Science Friday. Joel sketches in brief background, with emphasis on how Brit journalist Deer spent years outing Andrew Wakefield, author of the 1998 Lancet paper that triggered this mess (and that The Lancet retracted last year.) See also Retraction Watch, where another former colleague, Ivan Oransky. links to several other blog posts so I don't have to.
Katherine Hobson, at the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog explains what the BMJ did. At NPR's Shots blog, Scott Hensley describes the BMJ revelations too, and embeds video of Anderson Cooper's CNN interview with Wakefield. Wakefield (of course) denies all and says they're out to get him. True enough, I guess. Finally.
If you crave even more detail, Ivan grants your wish at Embargo Watch. He delves into a possible embargo break about the BMJ's hot news, asking a very current question: Does a tweet break an embargo? Not, I suspect, the last time that question will come up.
SELF-CORRECTING SCIENCE. As for the arsenic bug, it's on the back burner for the nonce, but let me point out one reflective post that appeared over the holidays. It's a group effort by the climate scientists at Real Climate, and it offers a rosy view of lessons from the arsenic episode. A splendid example of taking a lemon and making lemonade, and the antithesis of the vaccine/autism tale.
First, the post argues that the arsenic bug episode shows that "[m]ajor funding agencies willingly back studies challenging scientific consensus."
Second: "Journals such as Science and Nature are more than willing to publish results that overturn scientific consensus, even if data are preliminary – and funding agencies are willing to promote these results."
Third: "Scientists willingly critique what they think might be flawed or unsubstantiated science, because their credibility – not their funding – is on the line."
On points 1 and 3, fair enough. As for point 2, some of us thought the promotion excessive and misleading, leading to over-the-top speculation and nutsy conclusions that have done science--and science writing--no good. For additional views, see the nearly 200 comments.
THE PERIODIC TABLE OF BLOGS. The reason scientists were looking for arsenic-using organisms, you'll recall, is that arsenic shares many chemical properties with essential-for-life phosphorous, lying as it does just above phosphorous in the Periodic Table of the Elements. Which reminds me that I have been meaning to call to your attention to David Bradley's Periodic Table of Science Bloggers.
David, yet another former colleague, is omnipresent on digital media. He's probably best known for Sciencebase ("Science News and Views"), but he has color-coded his Periodic Table, and it is liberally dotted with orange cells denoting his impressive output--other blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and more.
My plan is to scour David's table for science blogs new to me (of which there are many) and, from time to time, draw your attention to a couple. Let's begin with the symbols for arsenic and phosphorous, As and P.
Under As, David posts a link to A Schooner of Science. It's written by Captain Skellet, who explains herself thus: "I’m currently studying a diploma in science communication, and I’m both a scientist and a pirate." The pirate motif is of unexplained origin, but pervasive.
Her most recent post is about electronic cigarettes as portrayed in the Angelina Jolie/Johnny Depp holiday vehicle The Tourist (to which the IMDB awards a measly 6 stars out of 10.) The Cap'n's conclusion about the cigarettes:
Smokeless cigarettes are a way to enjoy nicotine without getting a hefty dose of dangerous chemical cocktails. Plus the secondhand smoke is safer. So it’s an example of harm reduction. Plus your teeth would get whiter.
David's P is not, of course, phosphorous. Instead it links to the URL phylogenomics.blogspot.com, which turns out to be the well-known blog The Tree of Life by the well-known blogger Jonathan Eisen, evolutionary biologist at Davis and Academic Editor-in-Chief at PloS Biology. His most recent post, unfortunately, informs us that he is taking a break from blogging and tweeting for a few weeks. Too bad for the rest of us, but, considering his usual breakneck pace and output, wholly understandable.
The accidental juxtaposition of these two is a reminder that science blogging is open to everybody, from someone fairly new to the field to top professionals.
FOR THE LISTLESS, A LIST OF LISTS. Happy New Year, with fingers crossed. If you're still up for looking back at the year gone by, (and it's gone by not a moment too soon), Charlie Petit has rounded up assorted 2010 science nostalgia for you at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker. Top 10, Top 100, Top 5, Top 7, and most numbers in between.
NEXT WEEK, AT SCIO11. Next week comes the fifth annual Research Triangle digital festival, known this year as SciO11, which is short for Science Online 2011. Three hundred practitioners of digital science commentary, me included, are to be present. Even if you're not one of the 300, you can participate because NASW is helping the SciO11 folks webcast some of the goings-on. When it happens, livestreaming will be here, and eventually the archives too.
SciO11 begins Thursday night (January 13) and runs through Sunday afternoon (January 16). Here's the wiki. Twitter feed here.
So I will be abandoning this regular Friday post next week in favor of some live blogging from SciO11 instead, and perhaps a modicum of tweets. Many of your blogging favorites will be there too, and will doubtless be doing the same.
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