
Duke Officials Silenced Med Student Who Reported Trouble in Anil Potti's Lab - Fede_V
http://www.cancerletter.com/articles/20150109_1
======
Fede_V
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.

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

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

~~~
Fede_V
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.

~~~
ochoseis
> 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."

------
tokenadult
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](http://retractionwatch.com/?s=Anil+Potti)

~~~
chris_wot
Who filed the DMCA takedowns? Can we find out?

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

[http://retractionwatch.com/2013/02/05/wordpress-removes-
anil...](http://retractionwatch.com/2013/02/05/wordpress-removes-anil-potti-
posts-from-retraction-watch-in-error-after-false-dmca-copyright-claim/)

~~~
nchelluri
What the hell. That's crazy.

------
notlisted
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-...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/28/us-science-cancer-
idUSBRE82R12P20120328)

"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. "

~~~
hga
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).

~~~
chrisbennet
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?

~~~
hga
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](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 :-).

~~~
tjradcliffe
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.

------
comrh
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.

~~~
hga
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.

~~~
SolarNet
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.

~~~
hga
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.

~~~
SolarNet
Ever hear of Imposter Syndrome?
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)

------
johnminter
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...](http://bioinformatics.mdanderson.org/Supplements/ReproRsch-
All/Modified/StarterSet/)

------
settsu
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...

~~~
hga
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.

~~~
settsu
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.

------
pdevr
>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.

~~~
ochoseis
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.

~~~
hga
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.

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

~~~
honksillet
What else have they done?

~~~
tsotha
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.

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

------
danielweber
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.

------
debacle
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.

------
taylor-smith
Go to hell Duke

