Research Integrity
On April 21, 2020, three Israeli scientists published a new study online: Managing COVID-19 Pandemic Without Destructing the Economy at: ArXiv (an Open Access archive for scholarly articles in physics, mathematics, and computer science owned by Cornell University.) The authors are professors at Hebrew University. Dr. David Gershon is CEO…
“Nothing is more fundamental to the ethical conduct of clinical trials than the informed consent of research participants. The Nuremberg Code and every subsequent major international statement about ethics and medical research enshrine this role.” In his recent article in Science and Engineering Ethics, Dr. Mark Yarborough, Dean’s Professor of…
Candida auris is a fungus that presents multiple serious health threats that are especially concerning. It is difficult to identify, treat and contain; and it is especially persistent in that it is both resistant to treatment and to eradication methods. What makes this fungus very hard to eradicate is that…
Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates, by Swedish neuroscientists Anders Eklund, Tom Nichols, and Hans Knutsson, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2016) reveals the discovery of a major flaw in the software used by neuroscientists in functional magnetic resonance…
I. Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) For decades the norm in clinical practice was to prescribe hormone replacement therapy, a combination of estrogen plus progestin to menopausal women – despite the lack of scientific evidence of its safety and benefits. Science journalist, Barbara Seaman, founder of the Women’s Health Initiative, had examined the evidence…
An urgent call for a debate about the ethics of data secrecy. Absent the humanitarian raison d’etre for enrolling in a clinical trial, no human being should be put at any–even minimal risk–without adequate compensation as a laborer and the protection of Workmen’s Compensation insurance.
Three new studies–one,, a pharmaco-genetic study, is groundbreaking–confirm that widely prescribed psychotropic drugs that pose serious risks of harm, offer no therapeutic benefit.
News and Analysis for Colleges, Universities and Teaching Hospitals
Big Drop in OHRP Letters, Open Cases Raise Questions of Agency Commitment
In 2010, the Office for Human Research Protections issued and posted 16 determination letters, the lowest number in its 11-year history and less than half the number issued in each of the previous five years. Since 2007, the office has averaged 35 letters a year, down from a peak of 146 in 2002 and another high of 86 in 2006.
The number of determination letters is tied to the number of cases OHRP opens, and during the recent past, that number has also declined, RRC has learned, tumbling to an all-time low of six in 2009. Some tie the decline in activity to the arrival of Jerry Menikoff, whose tenure as OHRP director began in the late fall of 2008.
New York Times reporter Gina Kolata, broadcasts medical hype on the front page of the paper much the way Judith Miller broadcast hype fed to her by Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraq war lobby.[1]
A stunning admission of failure by major drug manufacturers who market drugs for the treatment of Alzheimer’s. "We really believe drugs are failing because we honestly don’t understand the disease."
This month PLoS editors called for a zero tolerance policy: calling upon journals to identify and retract ghostwritten articles and banish their authors from publishing in their journal.
The study, reported in The Journal of the American Medical Association, "found no evidence of an association between the serotonin gene and the risk of depression, no matter what people’s life experience was."
