The Secret Life of Dr. Chandra (Part 3)

this week we've brought you the story of dr. Ranjit Chandra a renowned canadian expert in nutrition and immunology a scientist with a secret dr. Chandra had published studies that were fake a fact several people knew so given that how did he get away with it apparently it wasn't as hard as you'd expect here's Chris O'Neil Yeates with the conclusion of our investigation into the secret life of dr. Chandra for almost three decades dr. Ranjit Kumar Chandra worked at Memorial University before one of his secrets was finally revealed a study heat conducted on multivitamins was clearly a fake no doubt his employer breathed a sigh of relief when dr. Chandra chose to retire quietly and move away for Memorial had a secret of its own they'd never told the scientific world that this was not the first time nor even the second time that dr. Chandra had committed scientific fraud what dr. Chandra seemed to understand was that if you want to get away with fraud there are a few simple rules you need to follow rule number one build up the kind of reputation that makes it extremely intimidating for anyone to question you dr. Chandra played this card well says former drug company researcher Mark Mazur how can you question this guy he is world famous he's published dozens of studies and there were claims that he had been nominated for a Nobel Prize and he had been selected by the United Nations to set up a nutrition immunology Center in Newfoundland he was the pride and joy of Canada I mean this guy had a real reputation so for anyone to challenge him and go against that reputation I think was probably just pretty daunting nurse Marilyn Harvey paid the price when she blew the whistle on dr. Chandra it was back in the early 90s when she told her employers that he was making up results on a baby formula study the University investigated but then let him off and once they did dr. Chandra turned around and sued Marilyn Harvey in July of 2000 knocking on my door and a sheriff delivered me papers and being sued by him for stealing data from another study that was done in in his department we know why he would have sued me he would have wanted me to he would have wanted basically I guess just to get me back and he wanted to make my life miserable dr. Chandra eventually dropped the lawsuit a few months after Marilyn Harvey proved he was lying but the point was driven home if you blow the whistle you embark on a lonely journey I was in it all by myself I was in it all by myself I did know that I was in for a herd road I did knowing the man himself I knew that but maybe my nya tivity more more or less lies in the people who make the final decisions there was a surprise a big surprise right now in Canada there's no legislation in place to protect whistleblowers like Marilyn Harvey and because of that fraud artists seldom have to worry about someone turning them in Berkeley University professor Seth Roberts says even if whistleblowers want to come forward they often decide it's just too risky it's extremely dangerous you could easily lose your whole career many people have it so if you're a wise person you basically don't do it it's just too dangerous I know several people who their career was destroyed after they blew the whistle rule number two if you're going to fake a study at least get your numbers right peer reviewers whose job it is to go over studies submitted for publication are pretty good at catching statistical problems but not as good at detecting other forms of fraud the former editor of the British Medical Journal Richard Smith says there's a good reason for that and anybody who knows about peer-review knows that sometimes it will pick up a fraudulent study but is by no means guaranteed to do so and that's largely because it starts from a position of trust so if somebody says there were 200 patients then you assume there were 200 patients you don't say well show me their records and show me their photographs I need to see them the whole thing is based on trust one thing that helped dr. Chandra get away with scientific fraud was that he was never required to prove he'd done the work jack Strawbridge is the director of faculty relations at Memorial University the burden of proof is on the university the it's not a guilty until proven otherwise kind of system it's innocent until proven guilty and he didn't have to prove anything we had to prove the case but the former BMJ editor Richard Smith says that's not how the British Medical Journal works 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 in September 2001 the federal government made it a requirement that all researchers keep their data for at least 25 years and that it has to be available for examination that takes away one Avenue of escape from dishonest researchers like dr. Chandra rule number three is one that dr. Chandra understood only too well and that was that his interest and his employers were fundamentally the same it just wasn't in Memorial University's best interest to find him guilty of fraud Jack Strawbridge says they had a lot to lose in the Chandra case he's been lucky in some ways because he's been his his problems of investigation have occurred in a social context where people are very afraid of lawsuits and afraid of being not just a being sued but of being of losing public money giving away public money in a settlement you know you if we had to give him three million dollars let's say because he sued us successfully that would be embarrassing to write is it any more embarrassing than having a researcher at your university who got away with scientific fraud not once but twice the that's a judgment that others will have to me University of Pennsylvania professor of psychology Saul Sternberg universities have a conflict of interest here in general the universities don't want to discover fraud amongst their faculty because otherwise they look bad you know at this very moment Memorial University I think would have a well deserved reputation as a place where you can get away with this kind of thing because Chandra got away with it and in spite of it you know well it's white if clear evidence he was guilty just in case you're counting on the federal government to step in you might want to listen to this back in 1997 McGill University professor Michael Kramer became suspicious about dr. chandri's milk studies and decided to investigate he wrote a three-page letter to Health Canada outlining the case for fraud the government wouldn't take action because they didn't fund Chandra study so I was alone essentially and I guess I could have tried to push it but it seemed to me in my conversations with the Dean at Memorial that they were not really eager to do so and they considered a closed case and I had heard some nasty things about about people who had been involved with Chandra before and I spoke to lawyers at the University and between my family and the university doing it alone it just didn't seem like a like it was worth doing so far only one of dr. chandri's fraudulent studies has been pulled from the scientific literature the rest remain in print even though we've identified many that are either highly suspicious or fraudulent so whose job is it to go back through the almost 200 papers dr. Chandra published over the years to look for further evidence of fraud Memorial University that first investigated dr. Chandra for fraud and then let him get away with it says it's not up to them if all the papers that had been submitted to all the journals in which he's published have passed muster the fact that one or two of them have have now been called into question obviously calls into question everything else he's done but whose job is it to go in and judge that I think it's each journal where he's published each editor should be saying hmmm I wonder if anything got by my set of peer reviewers and they should get those those papers that they've published and look at them carefully it's not our job we don't have the resources for it what do you former editor of the British Medical Journal Richard Smith the problem is that you know there are many different journals who've published dr. Chandler's work as I said earlier they don't have the legal standing to conduct an investigation they don't have the means it's not possible to apply due process and journals are not gathered together in any kind of overall body so I can't really see how journals can do it but I think what it does need and we've had this argument in Britain for a very long time you do need some kind of national body the Americans have it already lots of the Scandinavian countries have it we're about to have it in Britain we don't have it at the moment and I think Canada should look very seriously at having some kind of national body in the end it may have been dr. Chandra who tripped himself up by becoming particularly bold in his lies I think what happens with these people who probably have been producing fraudulent studies for a very long time as they just they get away with it so often they get more and more blase about it a little bit like in my mind serial killers it's almost as if eventually they want to be found out they just get bolder and bolder about it there seems little question that Memorial University will pay a price for its decision to let dr. Chandra get away with fraud if they hope to save money by avoiding a lawsuit they may find themselves paying in other ways why should anybody give money from wall university now since they're gonna given there an interest in the truth there were there clearly moist and protecting their reputation than they are in protecting the rest of us no I'm not saying it's easy for them to do something that hurts their reputation of course it isn't but they clearly did the wrong thing more than once the universities have to be concerned with honesty and that if you have any evidence that academics within your institution are behaving dishonestly and you have to act on that otherwise potentially the whole institution is polluted the whole places is undervalued if you think well here's a university that will turn a blind eye to straightforward dishonesty it raises all sorts of doubts about the institution you think well what can we trust anything coming out of there erotic Lee dr. Chandra may have done the scientific world a big favor by exposing just how easy it is to get away with fraud he may have finally given universities and journals the push they need to work together on a solution I'm Chris o Neill Yates

Channel: CBC News: The National

Views: 102,310

Rating: 4.7276597 out of 5

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: YbQNlm7sw5A

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2015