The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 9

20 Part I Wednesday. April 29. 1987 LF Cos Angeles Sixties RESEARCH: Increase in Biomedical Fakery Triggers Debate FRAUDULENT SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH had carried out very little of the work he described. Breuning, who now works at the Polk Center in Polk, has denied the charges. One of the most analyzed cases of scientific misconduct in recent years involved Dr.

John Darsee, an ambitious young heart researcher. Between 1978 and 1981. Darsee, while at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta and Please see RESEARCH, Page 21 Fraud in biomedical research is hardly new. But instances of such deception are on the rise, prompting heightened concern. Here are two notable examples: SMOiarSuiTirrwI7yaal Wc visit an (213).

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AW ik.lP the Til pathway. ciprciiion on atage 1 rCAN WE I ftySjP TALK? Continued from Page 8 cause few studies have been performed to find out. The National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine is expected to launch a major study of the issue soon, but details are not available. While wholesale fraud is believed to be rare, subtle abuses appear to be more frequent and probably far more damaging because they are less likely to be detected. Scientists have coined colorful expressions to describe some of these abuses, such as "honorary authorship" for the practice of padding the list of authors on a research paper and "salami science" for the practice of reporting results in several papers when one article would suffice.

The allegations also have focused attention on the often extreme pressures on scientists who seek prestige, large research grants and academic promotions. The problem "begins with fierce competition in college, excessive emphasis on grades and the rise of students who become 22-hour-a-day study machines," according to Dr. Robert G. Petersdorf of the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine. "Medical science today is too competitive, too big, too entrepreneurial and too much bent on winning." Not an Excuse But such pressures do not excuse misdeeds, he said, writing in the Annals of Internal Medicine last June: "Those who have chosen science for a career have, in a sense, taken an oath to discover and disseminate the truth, much as physicians have sworn the Oath of Hippocrates." The traditional view holds that science is ultimately self-correcting because researchers eventually discover the honest mistakes or frauds committed by others.

In the normal process of scientific research, there are many steps along the way at which mistakes or misdeeds can be picked up. These include the review of research grant proposals and the evaluation of scientific papers by independent experts. Also, when researchers undergo evaluation for promotion or tenure, their work is closely reviewed. Furthermore, researchers usually present their findings at scientific meetings, where they can be questioned by colleagues. Finally, significant discoveries often prompt confirmation efforts by other researchers; when the findings cannot be confirmed, doubts arise.

But instances of apparent deceit going undetected for many years abound, as outlined by journalists William Broad and Nicholas Wade in their 1982 book, "Betrayers of the Truth," and by Alexander Kohn of the Tel Aviv Medical School in his recently published book, "False Prophets: Fraud and Error in Science and Medicine." One scientist who apparently only published his best results was Robert A. Millikan, the American physicist who won a Nobel Prize in 1923 for measuring the electric charge on an electron as well as for pioneering work in photoelectricity. In the early 1900s, Millikan was engaged in a sharp debate with Felix Ehrenhaft of the University of Vienna: Millikan believed that all electrons had a single while Ehrenhaft believed that achieved international notoriety at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York City by coloring white skin grafts black with a felt pen to fake the results of skin transplant experiments in mice. Like the Summerlin case, many of the more recent instances of fraud have involved young researchers in large laboratories at prestigious institutions, where the pressures to publish and fear of failure may have been extreme. Typically, directors of such laboratories may employ dozens of junior scientists and technicians and be responsible for millions of dollars in research grants each year.

As a result, they often spend much of their time lecturing, administering and raising funds, leaving less time to supervise ongoing research. The young researchers in these laboratories also may be highly ambitious to get ahead and establish laboratories of their own. Such pressures appear to have been a factor in the case of Claudio Milanese, an Italian researcher at Harvard's Dana Farber Cancer Institute. His "discovery" of a new molecule that stimulated the immune system was reported in Science magazine in March, 1986. Missing Link News stories hailed the ery of "interleukin-4A" as a crucial missing link in understanding the the body's ability to fight disease.

The molecule appeared to belong to the same group of substances as interleukin-2, which is being used experimentally to treat patients with cancer. After the paper was published and Milanese returned to Italy, his co-authors, including his supervisor, Ellis L. Reinherz, continued to study the new molecule. But they were unable to reproduce his results. Milanese eventually conceded to Science magazine that he had manipulated the data.

That paper as well as a related paper in the Journal of Experimental Medicine and several other manuscripts awaiting publication were retracted in November. An investigation of the case by Harvard officials to determine the extent of the data-fudging is continuing. Treating the Retarded Another instance of alleged "serious scientific misconduct" involves Stephen E. Breuning, 34, a prominent psychologist who studied the treatment of mentally retarded children with behavior-control drugs, according to an investigative panel of the National Institute of Mental Health. Since the mid-1970s, his studies at the University of Pittsburgh and elsewhere have suggested that stimulant drugs, such as amphetamines, are effective in controlling aggressive and self-destructive behavior in some mentally retarded children.

His findings have influenced some physicians to prescribe these stimulants. The National Institute of Mental Health, which funded some of Breuning's research, began investigating Breuning in December, 1983, after a co-worker raised questions about the validity of his work. After a three-year probe, the institute's review panel recently concluded that Breuning actually COMPARE VALUE! Today's paging customers want lower rates SoCal, the "CHEAPER BEEPER" company, has just what you need. TTie T3-Ti structure is NV SaS Wpn oU (II dement, rha. c.

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One example is the Piltdown skull, unearthed in 1908 by Charles Dawson, a lawyer who collected fossils as a hobby, in an English gravel pit. In 1912, Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward, the keeper of the department of geology at the British Museum, announced the discovery at the meeting of the Geological Society of London. Many took the skull as proof of a missing link between apes and humans and that the first human was British as well. But some zoologists suspected a fraud from the start. Skulduggery Unearthed The debate was not settled until the 1950s, when researchers used new dating techniques to show that the skull consisted of an ape jaw with filed-down molars and part of a human skull that had been stained to appear old.

Despite the increasing sophistication of research methods and the procedures for reviewing scientific work, instances of fraud continue to crop up. In 1974, William T. Summerlin sub-electrons carrying fractional charges existed. Most physicists of the day eventually became convinced that Millikan was correct. In the 1970s, Harvard historian Gerald Holton took another look at the controversy.

By examining the original notebooks in which Millikan based a key 1913 paper, Holton discovered that Millikan had reported only 58 measurements of electron charges out of a total of 140 despite his assurances in the text of the paper that the data represented all experiments conducted during 60 consecutive days. Ehrenhaft, meanwhile, had published all his readings even those that did not support his theory. In recent years physicists using more accurate equipment than was available to either Millikan or Ehrenhaft have accumulated evidence suggesting that Ehrenhaft may have been correct after all. Most scientists now believe that electrons, like other subatomic particles, are made from smaller units called quarks. Other celebrated scientific discoveries have turned out to be MCI J03KR 12540 S.

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