The Secret Life of Dr. Chandra (Part 1)

there's a crack in the ivory tower at a Canadian university it concerns the work of dr. Ranjit Chandra at one time he was a prestigious researcher at Memorial University in Newfoundland today some of his work has been called into question serious questions about his methods and his motivation allegations of scientific fraud over the next few nights will tell you about dr. chandri's research and how his case was handled by Memorial University here's Chris O'Neill Yeats with the secret life of dr. Chandra st. John's Newfoundland it may seem like an unlikely place for scientific scandal to brew but in hindsight it appears perhaps the perfect place for almost three decades Memorial University provided an out-of-the-way corner of the scientific world for the career of dr. Ranjit Kumar Chandra to flourish over the years he'd become a world-renowned expert in the field of nutrition and immunology he was the recipient of the Order of Canada said to be a two-time Nobel Prize nominee a man they called the jewel of Memorial but in the summer of 2002 dr. Chandra packed up his office and quietly slipped into retirement he'd been accused of committing scientific fraud by one of the world's most prestigious journals for those who followed his work over the years it was a sad end to an otherwise remarkable career in 2005 the study that brought dr. chandri's career to a halt was officially retracted that might have been the end of his story but in fact it's just the beginning over the past year CBC News has been digging into the career of dr. Chandra and what we found is startling we've uncovered a pattern of scientific fraud and financial deception dating back to the 80s but perhaps the most astonishing fact is this the university that employed dr. Chandra knew he'd committed scientific fraud and diddle to stop him looking back on his career at Memorial it's difficult to pinpoint the moment dr. chandri's life of deception began this morning I'm going to defy all reports he was an engaging teacher and good with patience but those things seldom deliver international recognition so if recognition didn't come his way naturally he was not adverse to helping it along like the time dr. Chandra asked former colleague Sean Brosnan to nominate him for a scientific award the resume arrives on my desk complete with the nomination letter which he had written himself only requiring my signature and I was sort of impressed I'd never seen so many superlatives on a plate page in my life so I think I think granddad had a healthy ego and I think his reputation did matter to him dr. Chandra traveled the world accepting speaking engagements and attending conferences away from memorial for as many as a hundred and twenty days of the year and still he managed to turn out study after study as many as 11 in a single year in the late 80s one of the biggest studies dr. Chandra did was under the direction of this man back then Mark Mazur was a clinical research associate for Ross pharmaceuticals in the US the company that makes the baby formulas eisah mill and Similac Ross wanted to test whether their formulas could help babies avoid allergies and they picked dr. Chandra to conduct the study he had at that time a world wide reputation he is world renowned for his work he was one of the very first ones who ever did any research showing that nutrition affected immune development during infancy and childhood dr. Chandler's research nurse at the time was Marilyn Harvey it would be her job to find two hundred and eighty-eight newborns whose parents were prone to allergies who were willing to take part in the Ross study finding that many allergy prone babies in a city the size of Saint John's was not easy oh it took basically all of my time if I worked 40 hours a week it would also take my time in the evening and sometimes at night like I always felt that I was on call for 24/7 for two years or even more around the same time the food giant Nestle introduced their new formula good start to the North American market the product was supposed to help reduce the risk to some infants of developing allergies but the company was under increasing pressure from the FDA to prove those claims Nestle had hired dr. Chandra to scientifically test their product but as the pressure on the company mounted in late 1988 dr. Chandra was just in the early stages of conducting that study now this is a study that was similar in design to ours in fact it was almost identical DARS and we knew that he had been doing a study for Nestle because well frankly he was rather bold about what he was doing and he had posted in his office a list of all the grants the research grants and who provided them and how much they were almost as if it were something to be proud of by the following summer Marilyn Harvey had recruited only a handful of subjects for the Nestle study so she was shocked when she came across this the already published results of the Nestle study I would say there was only probably one quarter of the patients even recruited in this study and he had a he had all of the data analyzed and published even before we had even had the data collected mark Mazur saw the study - and one thing in particular caught his attention Nestle was comparing their formula to his company's products yet May's company had never been asked to provide dr. Chandra with the thousands of clinically labelled cans of their formula that would be needed for such a study I asked him directly I said dr. Chandra I was you know I read your study that you published and I was curious how you labeled all that formula because obviously we didn't do it for you and he said oh we did it here well that's not very reasonable because to feed that number of infants we're talking about 20,000 cans that would have to be labeled and to do that by hand we did it by machine at at the factory and to do that by hand with a handful of staff is pretty unreasonable so that was very suspicious from that point on and that wasn't all almost the same time the Nestle study was published dr. Chandra published yet another baby formulas study this one from Mead Johnson this one with more than 200 babies enrolled that made three studies involving more than 700 babies that Marilyn Harvey was supposed to have worked on I think even on the back he thank me thank thank I think that was an article I think Marilyn Harvey for diligent work and I thought but I didn't do it this this is not what I am doing this is this is you know published too early and the numbers are not correlating is it possible that someone else recruited those other babies impossible where you couldn't do a study of this magnitude would not be visible and there was another bewildering fact in the Nestle and Mead Johnson studies dr. Chandra concluded that those companies products help reduce the risk of allergies while the Ross formula which was very similar did nothing I said dr. Chandra how can you explain that we didn't see anything with our study and you did with the Nestle study and he said well the study really wasn't designed right I said dr. Chandra we designed the studying with you you designed it we that's why we went to you so you would be able to do it correctly and he said well you didn't really pay me enough money to do it correctly the turning point for Marilyn Harvey came when she happened to see a summary of yet another paper dr. Chandra planned to submit for publication it was a five year follow-up on the Nestle study a follow-up on a study that she knew hadn't been done in the first place she a ganache Dover whether or not to report him Here I am working with a world-renowned nutritionist trend-setting allergist immunologist but could I be wrong I mean you don't second-guess yourself could I be wrong I didn't want to jeopardize all the good work that was being done at Memorial University of Newfoundland but yet this head this story had to be told and someone else had to realize that this was happening and so Marilyn Harvey reluctantly became a whistleblower the university put together an independent panel to investigate the allegations against dr. Chandra they spent five months interviewing witnesses and examining five of his publications the investigators were all asked to sign a confidentiality agreement so the results have never been made public however we've obtained a copy of their report the report concluded with the evidence presented the testimony of many witnesses and the fact that absolutely no raw data or files of any kind were exhibited the committee cannot accept that the Nestle study was done anywhere near to the completeness or with the accuracy reported for that matter the same can probably be said for the Mead Johnson work has published in the British Medical Journal in fact the committee could not identify anyone who did or remembers doing a significant amount of work and the co-authors of the papers had very little or very likely nothing to do with the work with respect to the allegations the committee is therefore led to conclude that scientific misconduct has been committed by dr. Chandra but despite the committee's conclusions the university decided not to take any action against dr. Chandra University vice president Jack Strawbridge says the investigation was dropped because dr. Chandra accused the committee of bias and threatened to sue the university was facing a potential lawsuit there would be loss of reputation loss of income etc we you could be looking at a very very large lawsuit and the university would want to be sure that it was on firm footing before it took any disciplinary action I mean the only disciplinary action that would be appropriate in a circumstance like that would be firing I mean you're you're not going to suspend him if it was as gross as what the committee concluded you know something very substantial and and fabricating research results is usually considered a capital crime in academia so was the university so afraid of being sued that it let dr. Chandra essentially get away with academic fraud universities like ours are publicly funded I think if dr. Chandra had been working in a different area of science where where let's say life and death were involved if he were claiming a cure for cancer let's say that there was fraudulent but these were babies and baby formula at a time when hypoallergenic formula was pretty much an unknown entity but he was looking at reducing the incidence of ectopic eczema it wasn't the same as life-and-death matters where I think if those had been at stake it's possible the university might have acted differently while the investigation against dr. Chandra had been going on the editors of one medical journal had been hanging on to his study he'd submitted to them for publication but when the Journal of pediatric gastroenterology and nutrition was told by memorial that there was insufficient evidence to prove dr. Chandra had committed fraud went ahead and published his 5-year follow-up on the Nestle milk study a follow-up on a study that had never been done in the first place Jack Strawbridge says the journals editor should have read between the lines if I was the editor of a journal and I was told by a scientists home university that there wasn't sufficient evidence to proceed to me that is a huge red flag I don't know why they would have published the paper I wouldn't have if I was the journal editor but they were counting on you as a university to tell them the straight goods about whether or not dr. Chandra had committed scientific fraud in in the delicate world in which we live and that is as close to the straight goods as you're probably going to get it had been three years since Marilyn Harvey had blown the whistle on dr. Chandra the news that Memorial would take no action against him came as a shock still she's never doubted that she did the right thing why was your conviction suffer because it was fraud it was academic fraud it was wrong this was just purely wrong it was wrong how many more of dr. Chandra studies are there that might contain fraudulent results it's difficult to say without seeing the raw data however the journals in which dr. Chandra published might want to take a look at some of his studies including this one for example in the Canadian Journal of Public Health it's based on data from the non-existent Nestle study or this $61,000 study done for the Newfoundland government on the effect of fish oil on rheumatoid arthritis we could find no evidence it had been done at all or his best-known study published in The Lancet in 1992 we tried to contact the people dr. Chandra thanked for their help but none of those we could find recalled working on the study and according to berkeley professor seth roberts there are other reasons to be suspicious about this one there's his typical possibilities in Lancet paper and there's some mistakes there was inconsistency between the graphs and the text and there's this claim that everybody approached agreed to be in the study that's just not possible and there's more when we return dr. Chandra strikes again the statistician said this has all the hallmarks of having been completely invented in the spring of 2000 a study arrived at the London offices of the prestigious British Medical Journal dr. Chandra had submitted a study to them about the effects of his own patented multivitamin on the memories of seniors one of the journals editors was so convinced something was wrong with it he asked the editor-in-chief Richard Smith to have a look at it I thought yes I have all kinds of doubts about this too we then sent it to two reviewers one a statistical expert with a lot of experience of research misconduct and two a reviewer who knew about the kind of work it was and both of them had very serious doubts in fact the statistician said this has all the hallmarks of having been completely invented the BMJ rejected dr. Chandra study and asked memorial to investigate so they sent that to us and we thought oh here we go and something else you know and president asked the then vice-president research and myself to have a look at it dr. Chandra meanwhile wasn't about to allow a rejection from the BMJ to stand in his way he submitted the same study to another journal Nutrition and this time he got lucky the September 2001 issue carried dr. Chandra study about the effects of a multivitamin on the memory of seniors a multivitamin he'd already patented the results were so startling they caught the attention of the New York Times and that ironically was bad news for dr. Chandra psychology professors saw Sternberg from the University of Pennsylvania read about Chandru's remarkable results and he called his friend Berkeley University professor Seth Roberts both professors found the results too good to be true forever and ever people would be taking his money multivitamin supplements after they got to age 65 because it was incredible what he found you changed everyone's life you know millions and billions of people's lives if it was true and yet here it wasn't just an average Journal what's that about dr. Chandra claimed to have given 96 healthy seniors from st. John's a daily multivitamin pill for a year he then tested their memory for improvements but the test results didn't make sense turned out that the scores that his subjects were getting put them in the demented category the average score made them demented now so they would have been hospitalized or under some kind of care but in fact he claimed that none of them was demented they were all normal functioning people yeah these people would have been too demented to understand what a study was if she believed his numbers and yet after just one year of taking his multivitamin these same seniors went from demented to completely normal and then there was dr. chandri's claimed that he tested each vitamin in his multivitamin separately and at different strengths it's unbelievable it's just too much work gigantic gigantic resource is what we need to do Dida to do such a study there's no way we'd had to have grant a gigantic grant just to do that study a couple of people dozens of people thousands of dollars a million dozens of helpers and about hundreds of thousands of dollars the two researchers found many more glaring errors in dr. Chandra study is there any possible explanation for the errors that you found in dr. Chandra study oh yes there's a very possible explanation it's that he made it up by 2002 dr. Chandra knew his studies were under attack and in what now appears to have been a desperate bid to shore up support for his two beleaguered studies he published two more this time in his own journal nutrition research the first publication backed up the findings of his study that was under attack the second study by an Amrit Jain happened to support the findings of his 1992 Lancet study that had also been questioned unfortunately no one has ever been able to find Amrit Jain he had no email address which was very strange and had his mailing address was a rented mailbox in Canada his institutional affiliation was in India but his his his physical mailbox was in Canada and not only that it was a rented mailbox that's extraordinary I think that Jane never did the study Jane may not even exist there may be no such nutritional scientists called Jane by 2002 Memorial University knew once again it had a problem they asked dr. Chandra to turn over his data he accused the university of losing it it's late little kids talking you know that the dog ate my homework somebody stole my data or you've lost my data well that immediately sets all kinds of alarm bells ringing I mean it is a condition of submitting a study to the BMJ that if we ask to see the original data you have to produce it and if you can't then I'm afraid the assumption is that probably this was invented rather than turn over his data dr. Chandra retired in the summer of 2002 just as he says he'd always plan to do Memorial shut the door behind him and considered the case closed again we tried we weren't able to get the data and and he resigned the are there other things we might have done well there's always things you could do I suppose but a lot of them would involve so many resources that we might be accused of having been seen as a witch hunt a witch hunt is definitely not what Marilyn Harvey had in mind a satisfactory conclusion to the investigation would have been enough when Barry said I have had periods of devastation and then I have had curious saying you did what you could do let it go so that's how I tried to live I did what I could do as a nurse as a person I did what I could do that's it since retiring in 2002 dr. Chandra travels the world speaking at conferences publishing studies and tending to his new vitamin pill business so far only one of his studies has been retracted the rest remain in the published literature even though by our count there are at least 10 that are either fraudulent or highly suspicious apparently getting away with fraud is not that hard tomorrow night in part two we followed dr. chandri's trail to Switzerland and we asked the obvious question if dr. Chandra didn't do all those studies what happened to the money he got for doing all those studies I'm wondering how does a researcher from Newfoundland have 120 bank accounts in over a dozen countries with millions of dollars willing to answer it without money earlier he was out to feed his bank account any way he could what do you know about the funding that dr. Chandra received outs outside of Memorial almost nothing that's part two of the secret life of dr. Chandra tomorrow night on the Nationals I'm Chris O'Neill Yates we've asked dr. Chandra for a sit-down interview repeatedly over the past year but this afternoon after we announced this story would be broadcast tonight a lawyer acting on his behalf said dr. Chandra would now agree to be interviewed but next week at the earliest and prior to the broadcast of the story we declined to delay tonight's report and we repeated our invitation to dr. Chandra to interview him on these topics at anytime

Channel: CBC News: The National

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Keywords: CBC, the, national, The National, CBC Television, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, ranjit chandra, chandra, Memorial University Of Newfoundland (College/University), The Lancet (Journal), BMJ (Journal)

Id: gKYr1VerT4A

Length: 25min 48sec (1548 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2015