bad science

In my last post, I noted that there were, among the projects, a number of studies of how family history affected risk of various diseases. These were built around some methods that Liz and I developed for querying genealogical databases, primarily the Utah Population Database, fondly referred to as the UPDB. The UPDB provided huge numbers of connections between people over multiple generations, but was hit-or-miss with the disease data that was needed to connect people with the same condition. The cancer data was excellent, thanks to longstanding connections to the statewide cancer registry. Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimers, and many (most) others, though, were only available with the help of clinical enterprises, most of which had financial and competitive interests that frequently impeded research.

Over time, we developed some approaches that allowed for reasonable conclusions to be drawn about smaller clinical datasets, and a steady trickle of physicians brought data to us for analysis. Among these were a number of fine physician-scientists with whom it was a pleasure to work.

Not all of them, however. Shortly before we left Utah for Louisville, I worked with an ophthalmologist who had a fairly typical clinical series of patients with age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of visual impairment and blindness among older folks.

As was the norm, I identified the relatives of his patients, including which of them were also affected, and computed the relative risks (compared to controls), and the usual supporting statistics, wrote the bulk of the Methods and Results sections of the resulting paper, and contributed commentary about the wider implications. For some reason he felt my contribution was not worth noting, however, and he sent off his draft, got it accepted and published, without my name on the author list.

If you're not listed as an author, of course, you don't participate in any correspondence with the journal or its editors. Nor is it the practice of any university oversight committee to query all the faculty not listed as authors to make sure no one was left off the list. So I didn't see this paper until it came out. I wrote a strongly-worded email to this ophthalmologist (he's the senior author--the one listed last), cc'd to higher-ups at the university, and extracted a promise to revise the online publication to correctly reflect my contribution. The principle mattered more to me than this particular publication, and I promptly forgot about the entire incident.

Until I saw this headline. It seems that what goes round comes round, at least if you go far enough around. I especially liked this line from The Scientist: "Zhang’s poor record of disclosing conflicts of interest accompanies a sketchy past of putting patients and research participants at risk during his work." 

That and apparently being some kind of spy. In comparison, my beef about authorship is pretty small. But I think the view into his character afforded by that minor incident was clear enough, and I was not at all surprised that someone who can so easily step on a colleague has no compunction about abusing his patients.

[By the way, it's clear in the first link above that he lied about contacting the journal. Saves me the embarrassment of having co-authored a paper with him.]