Physician Researcher Discredited, Potential Implications for Lung Cancer Research

July 22, 2010 - 11:03 am email to a friend

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Dr West

Lest we think that media-driven self-immolation is reserved only for people Like Mel Gibson and Lindsey Lohan, this week we saw a little more drama than we prefer to see in the world of medical research, touching quite close to home. Following a rather stunning article in the low budget but tenacious Cancer Letter (primarily read by cancer and pharma/biotechl industry insiders), the New York Times ran a more widely publicized story about a highly regarded young researcher from Duke, Dr. Anil Potti, who allegedly lied about his being awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, and whose research on genetic signatures of lung cancer has recently been questioned after being published in the New England Journal of Medicine and several other very high-tier journals.

I know Anil, and he seems to be a good guy, but if the allegations are true, and it appears from the evidence, even if it’s not the type of evidence we usually discuss here, then he went too far in the more common practice of “resume padding” that so many people do by exaggerating their experience a bit or calling their student role a “pre-doctoral fellowship”. Not surprisingly, saying you won something as prestigious and verifiable as a Rhodes catches up with you, and his applications stopped mentioning this a few years ago, but it was too late. His reputation and the work he’s done at Duke have all been discredited, his research suspended, and a payments from a large grant of $729,000 from the American Cancer Society have been suspended.

I’m highlighting this now not because I want to cover the more tawdry side of science and medicine, but because it’s important to note that some work that we’ve discussed here, focusing on the Duke gene signature work on metagenes (see here and here, for example, but this work is mentioned in many discussions of post-operative therapy and genetic predictive and prognostic factors) may well be invalid. First, it’s fair to question the integrity of the data produced by someone who misrepresented their past history. But in addition to the criticism of Dr. Potti’s character, the complex statistical analyses that the metagene work is predicated upon has been criticized previously by a pair of statisticians from MD Anderson Cancer Center, as described in a prior article in the Cancer Letter.

Here’s an example of why any research, whether it’s work on a new drug from a biotech company or a natural medicine approach being advertised, needs to be studied and proven to be helpful from multiple places. Any one person or institution, even if they have a great reputation, could be found to have fallen prey to a desire for fame and money and do unscrupulous work. This is also why my bio only claims that I was a finalist in People’s Sexiest Man Alive annual review. You can’t get too greedy…

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