She loves, in writing this blog, to encounter old familiar names, the names of people she wrote about on University Diaries years and years ago, when she was just a tyke and didn’t know that, you know, once a shit, always a shit.
For instance, when UD was still in diapers she wrote about a professor at Columbia University named Rogerio Lobo. It was June 8, 2004, to be exact, and here’s that post:
Intercessional Insemination at Columbia University
Wow! Psychology Today excitedly revealed, back in 2002, the results of a Columbia University study which showed that if people pray for infertile women undergoing in vitro treatment, the women they pray for double their chances of getting pregnant. “Women who were prayed for had a 50 percent pregnancy rate, compared with a 26 percent success rate among those for whom no one prayed.”
We’re not talking here about your local priest or your canasta partner kneeling in the neighborhood church — in this “amazing” study, total strangers thousands of miles away from the Korean women involved (none of the women were told they were experimental subjects) prayed to anonymous photos of them….
And that wasn’t all! “Instead of merely having a group of people pray for the women attempting to get pregnant,” a scientist who reviewed the experiment remarked, “the study had one group doing that, a second group praying to help the first group, and a third group praying that ‘God’s will or desire be fulfilled for the prayer participants’ in the first two groups.” Kind of a chain letter thing.
This impressive protocol and its stunning results blew Roger [sometimes rendered Rogerio] Lobo, chair of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, right out of the uterine sac. “The results were so highly significant they weren’t even borderline. We spent time deciding if it was even publishable because we couldn’t explain it.”
But publish it they did, in the eminent Journal of Reproductive Medicine, and there it sat amid swelling media coverage, until various scientific oversight agencies took a look at it.
At which point the swelling went down. Efforts to talk to the three principals about it have not gone well. “One of the authors,” writes an observer, “has left the university and refuses to comment, another now claims to have not actually participated in the study and also refuses to comment [that‘d be Lobo, who now says he just put his name on the study -- a common and scandalous scientific practice that no one finds scandalous], and another is on his way to federal prison for fraud.”
That’d be veteran conman Daniel P. Wirth, about to spend five years in jail for too many crimes to mention here. Wirth has no medical degree, but did purchase a diploma mill masters in parapsychology, spiritual healing, and therapeutic touch. Before the pregnancy study, Wirth’s research involved amputating salamander limbs and then waving his hands over the salamanders to make their limbs grow back.
Five years later, Lobo remains a Columbia University professor in excellent standing.
And he’s back in the news!
He’s one of four ghost-ridden professors singled out by Senator Grassley in a letter to NIH asking about the practice among grant recipients.
To sample Lobo’s protoplasmic praise for Wyeth hormones, click on Lobo.tif when you get to the Index of Ghostwriting (good name for a novel).
Here’s a comment from one of the readers at theheart.org:
How curious. Some leopards really don’t ever change their spots. Rogerio Lobo embarrassed Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons once before and did it big time.
He put his name as lead author on a widely touted “study” — that he had no part in conducting — to help get it published. The now infamous study published in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine — claimed remote Christian prayers doubled the fertility rate of women being treated for infertility in South Korea. Although the bogus study is a scientific embarrassment, the journal editor refused to retract it or print a substantial correction, despite the mushrooming scandal, which included the arrest and conviction of Daniel Wirth, the con-artist author who cooked up the study.
Wirth turned out to be a lawyer, and psychic investigator, and life-long con artist. In 1994, he was pleaded guilty to one of the numerous counts for fraud he was charged with and was sentenced to 5 years in a federal penitentiary.
The second author, Dr. Kwang Cha has also been accused of misconduct, including a serious charge of plagiarism.
When Columbia found itself facing an NIH ethics violation investigation (because the infertility study involved women without their informed consent) the school got Lobo to admit that he put his name on the paper as lead author even though he didn’t know about the study until after it had been completed! That was the school’s defense against the human subjects ethics violation charge. Lobo and Columbia then stonewalled, refusing to answer questions about the tawdry affair. Following the scandal, Lobo was no longer the head of Columbia’s Ob/Gyn Department.
Now here he is again, apparently putting his name on “research” papers he never wrote in order to help get them published.
I don’t really blame the leopard not changing his spots. I blame the zoo keepers at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, who circled the circus wagons to protect him six years ago.
Yes. Call him a leopard. Call him a shit. But what do you call a university that keeps a man like Rogerio Lobo on its faculty?
Leopardshit, I guess.
********************************
We have the Index of Ghostwriting thanks to lawsuits against Wyeth (I usually rail against Our Litigious Culture, but I’ve become convinced, in following the pharma industry, that some lawsuits are indispensable) and thanks to the people behind this blog, PLoS Medicine, who got the documents released. Excerpts from their editorial announcing the publication of the ghostwriting documents on their site:
While editors, medical schools, and universities have turned a blind eye to, or at the least failed to tackle head-on the pervasive presence of ghostwriting, drug companies and medical education and communication companies have built a vast and profitable ghostwriting industry. Recruitment of academic “authors” appears, within some academic circles, to have come to be considered acceptable…
How did we get to the point that falsifying the medical literature is acceptable? How did an industry whose products have contributed to astounding advances in global health over the past several decades come to accept such practices as the norm? Whatever the reasons, as the pipeline for new drugs dries up and companies increasingly scramble for an ever-diminishing proportion of the market in “me-too” drugs, the medical publishing and pharmaceutical industries and the medical academic community have become locked into a cycle of mutual dependency, in which truth and a lack of bias have come to be seen as optional extras…
August 22nd, 2009 at 2:29PM
[...] is the original: University Diaries » UD is, at bottom, sentimental. Tags: fertility, fertility-rate, has-changed, journal, november, religion–, reproductive, [...]
August 22nd, 2009 at 3:45PM
Margaret,
Thanks for picking up my comment on theheart.org and amplifying it. I couldn’t believe the unbridled arrogance of the Columbia U. College of Physicians and Surgeons in dealing with this scandal 6 years ago. They treated this reporter with sneering contempt for trying to find the facts behind the Lobo-Cha-Wirth affair.
And there’s additional scandalous stuff I didn’t mention up my theheart.org post. For example, Cha had been medical director of the Cha Columbia Infertility Clinic (now either defunct or renamed I believe). Only problem is Dr. Kwang Cha is NOT licensed to practice medicine in New York or any other state in the US.
Isn’t this a serious problem, I wanted to know. No problemo, Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons insisted. Dr. Cha was not practicing medicine when he was the Cha Columbia Infertility Clinic’s medical director.
Now I would have no problem believing Kwang Cha was not practicing medicine when he authored that infamous study of voodoo "medicine," but how do you not practice medicine when you’re billed as the "medical director" of a medical clinic at Columbia University?
Very strange things become possible when you cross the line of rationality into Woo Woo. And, as Columbia U.’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and too many other U.S. medical schools have discovered, there’s lots of money to be made introducing and teaching Woo Woo into "medical" curricula and practice.
August 22nd, 2009 at 3:59PM
Andrew: My pleasure.
Must say, I remain baffled as to why medical schools are so scandalously different from other parts of the American university – so indifferent to the origins and legitimacy of their faculty’s work, and to their conflicts of interest.
I guess part of the answer is that med schools don’t really seem to HAVE faculty, the way the rest of the university does. Most people listed as professors seem to have little connection to the institution as a university, rather than as a teaching hospital, say… But I really don’t know. I’ve only begun to understand that there’s a kind of systemic, overlooked fraudulence about many medical faculties. The sort of thing that spawns Michael Jackson’s drugmeister, Arnold Klein — still on UCLA’s faculty far as I can tell…
August 22nd, 2009 at 11:59PM
Margaret,
There’s enough in this phenomenon for dozens of dissertations in a variety of disciplines. Take for example the sociology of fraud in science. More than a quarter century ago, when Nicholas Wade and William Broad published their disturbing book, Betrayers of the Truth, describing some of the most egregious and notorious cases of deceit and fraud in science, a very disturbing pattern emerged: Medical schools were spawning a disproportionate number of crooks, liars, and cheats. Despite the famous oath physicians take to do no harm, a shocking majority of frauds in science were MDs, rather than Ph.Ds. That was especially disconcerting considering far more scientists are PhDs than MDs. I and others pondered and speculated then why medical doctors may lie, cheat, and steal much more than other academics.
I haven’t seen a more recent comparison. But, considering how many medical schools have lowered some of their ethical standards, I suspect the discrepancy has grown much worse. I’ve often watched with dismay as medical school academics lie and misrepresent their research data repeatedly with impunity. I’ve seen much less of that in non-medical fields of research.
When Wade and Broad wrote about the betrayers of the truth, the frauds in science usually suffered serious consequences when exposed. Not one of the people they wrote about was allowed to continue in science research. Today, it’s a different world. Just look at the Cha and Lobo prayer study scandal to see how times have changed.
August 24th, 2009 at 12:22PM
From today’s news: Yet another science cheat gets caught and multiple published papers are being retracted.
As I read this report, of a PhD grad student who wantonly created his data used in several published research papers, I thought: O.K. Clearly not all of the science frauds are MDs.
But then I read deeper into the article and saw that this fraud had earned his MD six years ago. He then went back to get his PhD — apparently in creative fiction.
Louisiana State University won’t comment whether the fraud will lose the PhD earned last year with the help of that bogus data. However, a spokesman said he’s not going to be stripped of his MD. I’m not surprised. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that medical schools have much lower ethical standards than the other sciences.
Nobody who jeopardizes the health and lives of patients by publishing fraudulent clinical data should be allowed to practice medicine. That should be clear. But it’s not, at least to those who train, license, and discipline physicians in America.
http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55917/
Student fudged immunology data
Posted by Jef Akst
[Entry posted at 21st August 2009 09:13 PM GMT]
A former graduate student studying the link between immune function and symptoms of high cholesterol at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center-Shreveport fudged data in three published papers and one manuscript under review, according to a report by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI).
Ryan Wolfort admitted to "fabricating tabulations and the associated statistical analyses" in four reports stemming from his dissertation research on the role of the immune system in endothelial dysfunction associated with diet-induced high cholesterol, the ORI statement said. Specifically, Wolfort falsified measurements of endothelial function in all four reports, results of a cytokine measurement assay in one of the published papers, and levels of superoxide production in the other two.
As a result of the ORI’s finding, all three published papers — two in the American Journal of Physiology-Heart and Circulatory Physiology and one in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology — have been retracted or are in the process of being retracted. Two of the papers had not been cited, according to ISI, and the other was not found in the database. In addition, Wolfort has been suspended from eligibility for federal grants and is barred from serving on any US Public Health Service (PHS) advisory committee for two years.
Although Wolfort claimed that some of these falsifications were unintentional, he admitted to deliberately erasing the files and discarding the notebooks containing the raw data for these measures — an offense which the ORI also considers an act of research misconduct. This action "did play into ORI’s findings," John Dahlberg, the director of ORI’s Division of Investigative Oversight, told The Scientist in an email, adding that Wolfort received such a severe sentence because of "the overall scope of the admitted misconduct."
The university refused to comment on how the fraud would affect the status of Wolfort’s PhD earned in 2008, but he will retain his MD degree, earned from the LSU Health Science Center School of Medicine in 2003, Dahlberg said.
Due to ongoing "legal issues" related to the case, university employees — including Wolfort’s PhD advisor D. Neil Granger, who was a coauthor on all three of the published papers in question — were unable to comment. The university also refused to comment on Wolfort’s current whereabouts.
"The faculty and administration of LSU Health Sciences Center at Shreveport subscribe to the highest standards of research integrity and procedures are in place designed to assure that integrity," the university said in a statement. "The report in the Federal Register is evidence that these procedures are effective."
August 25th, 2009 at 9:00AM
Yes MD faculty in medical schools do cheat more and the origins of this can be tied to money. It is because they are part of medical complexes that although officially non profit are really anything but that, encouraging faculty to be "entrepreneurial" and also the fact that they develop gigs as "physician researchers" which is really just a meal ticket for big payouts from pharma. Physicians for too long have enjoyed an over exalted status in society which makes them more brash in their money grabs. The entire medical system is corrupted in my opinion.
September 22nd, 2009 at 10:40AM
[...] home to Rogerio Lobo, who believes long-distance, group prayer on behalf of specific fertile women makes them fertile; [...]