As Lancet and NEJM authors retract studies on Covid, recalling a few recalls – The Indian Express

Written by Abantika Ghosh | New Delhi | Updated: June 6, 2020 8:53:54 am One of the two retraction statements published by the journals was from the author of the study on hydroxychloroquine on Covid-19 treatment. (AP)

In the wee hours of Friday two reputed medical journals, The Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine published retraction statements from the authors on two studies one on hydroxychloroquine in COVID19 and another on the effect of some cardiovascular drugs. The statements came after some grave questions were raised about the quality of the data used in both studies, sourced from a Chicago firm called Surgisphere.

The retractions came following the companys refusal to give access to the data for an independent audit. Surgisphere continues to stand its ground in a detailed response on the concerns raised it said: we stand behind the integrity of our studies and our scientific researchers, clinical partners, and data analysts.

For the global scientific community though, neither are retractions and questionable data/analyses new, nor their spirited defenses including interesting ones such as the data having been eaten by termites. In fact there is even a name for this the Darsee Syndrome for the compulsive need among researchers to publish papers or perish.

The name derives itself from John Darsee a young investigator who was considered extremely bright and was offered a job in Harvard in 1979, very early in his career before being accused of data fraud. This is how he was described in a 2011 article in Nature Medicine on retractions in scientific journals. John Darsee was a young clinical investigator with a long list of publications in top-tier journals and a promising career ahead of him in cardiology research. Described by a former supervisor as one of the most remarkable young men in American medicine, Darsee was offered a faculty position at the Harvard Medical School in Boston at the age of 33. But then his career quickly started to unravel. One day, colleagues caught Darsee fraudulently labeling data for a study into heart attacks; further investigations revealed scientific misconduct on a massive scale, and, eventually, Darsee was fired and barred from receiving federal grant money for ten years. More than 80 of his papers were withdrawn from the literature. He ultimately apologized for publishing inaccuracies and falsehoods.

Some years back, Canadian researcher Ranjit Chandra, a former professor of Memorial University, sued CBC for a three part document called The Secret Life of Dr Chandra that talked about his fraudulent research, that was retracted by many journals. Chandra was asked to pay $1.6 million to the broadcaster to cover legal expenses. Chandras study on whether some infant formulae can protect a child from eczema was published in the BMJ in 1995 but retracted 10 years later. In the retraction note BMJ editors wrote: The BMJ has retracted the article after receiving a copy of an inquiry into the research of R K Chandra, which was conducted by the Memorial University of Newfoundland and completed in August 1995. The university did not publish the inquiry report at the time. Nor did it notify the editors of journals that had published articles by Chandra that were considered in the report. The BMJ obtained a copy of the report when it came into the public domain as a result of Chandra taking and losing a legal action against the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), which aired television programmes about Chandra in 2006. The BMJ also said that the inquiry committee found among other things, absolutely no raw data, very little contribution from the co-authors and there were no hospital records to support the study.

Apart from being Indian origin, Chandra has an interesting India link too. During P V Narsimha Raos time, Chandras name did the rounds for a brief while for the post of DG ICMR. It was eventually scuttled because of his Canadian citizenship and the DGs post went to Dr G V Satyawati.

Closer home in Moradabad, Dr R B Singh, a private practitioner co-authored what BMJ which published the study in 1992 on diet and heart disease, calls a citation classic, cited 225 times (at the time of writing), including in guidelines. In his correspondence with BMJ between 1992-2003 his letterheads said he is an honorary professor of preventive cardiology and nutrition. His address in Moradabad has been the address of Heart Research Laboratory, the Heart Research Laboratory and Centre of Nutrition Research, the Centre of Nutrition and Heart Research, the Medical Hospital and Research Centre, and the International College of Nutrition.

Faced with questions about some of his papers and an investigation started by Dr Samiran Nundy, then editor of the National Medical Journal of India, Singh famously told those probing his work that his records had been eaten by termites. In the interim his papers continued to appear in other journals including The Lancet. While BMJ did not retract the paper ite rejected several others from Singh and it mounted a long investigation during which it also reached out to editors of other medical journals and documented in an article in great detail its efforts to validate the paper through independent investigations.

The BMJ contacted some of the journals in which Dr Singhs work has been published, including those in which versions of the rejected BMJ papers had appeared. Dr William Roberts of Baylor University Medical Center, Dallas, editor of the American Journal of Cardiology, confirmed that two or three of Singhs papers had been published in his journal in the early 1990s: Singhs articles in the [journal] received good reviews. Once concerns had been raised by the BMJ, all subsequent manuscripts were declined, he said Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, believes that Western journal editors are so keen to publish research from developing countries, particularly if it offers cheap solutions to costly problems, that they tend to give the benefit of the doubt to aspiring authors, BMJ wrote in that article.

There are others such as Japanese cancer immunologist Naoki Mori, at least of 30 of whose papers have been retracted and Montreal University researcher Zhiguo Wang who has made retractions.

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As Lancet and NEJM authors retract studies on Covid, recalling a few recalls - The Indian Express