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Scientific Scandals -- Real and Manufactured

This week, we discuss scientific scandals. These are not just cases of malfeasance among scientists -- something we hope is very rare and will always get caught -- but also include cases where the public has been duped by turning off their critical thinking faculties. We will focus on four main scandals:

  1. Andrew Wakefield MMR vaccine scandal
  2. Jan Hendrik Schön scandal
  3. ClimateGate
  4. Power Lines and Cancer

The first two are cases of malfeasance; the last two are about the promulgation of pseudoscience for fun and profit.

Andrew Wakefield MMR vaccine scandal

I heartily recommend an excellent cartoon summary of the Wakefield scandal by cartoonist Darryl Cunningham. It shows how the promulgation of pseudoscience sickens and kills people.

From Wikipedia's article on the MMR vaccine controversy:- (Note: no credit is claimed for this material. It is not my own work.)

The MMR vaccine controversy centered around the 1998 publication of a fraudulent research paper in the medical journal The Lancet that lent support to the subsequently discredited claim that colitis and autism spectrum disorders could be caused by the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. The media has been heavily criticized for its naïve reporting and for lending undue credibility to the architect of the fraud, Andrew Wakefield.

Investigations by Sunday Times journalist Brian Deer revealed that Wakefield had multiple undeclared conflicts of interest, had manipulated evidence, and had broken other ethical codes. The Lancet paper was partially retracted in 2004 and fully retracted in 2010, and Wakefield was found guilty by the General Medical Council of serious professional misconduct in May 2010 and was struck off the Medical Register, meaning he could no longer practice as a doctor. In 2011, Deer provided further information on Wakefield's improper research practices to the British medical journal, BMJ, which in a signed editorial described the original paper as fraudulent. The scientific consensus is that no evidence links the vaccine to the development of autism, and that the vaccine's benefits greatly outweigh its risks.

Following the initial claims in 1998, multiple large epidemiological studies were undertaken. Reviews of the evidence by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academy of Sciences, the UK National Health Service, and the Cochrane Library all found no link between the vaccine and autism. While the Cochrane review expressed a need for improved design and reporting of safety outcomes in MMR vaccine studies, it concluded that the evidence of the safety and effectiveness of MMR in the prevention of diseases that still carry a heavy burden of morbidity and mortality justifies its global use, and that the lack of confidence in the vaccine has damaged public health. A special court convened in the United States to review claims under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program rejected compensation claims from parents of autistic children.

The claims in Wakefield's 1998 The Lancet article were widely reported; vaccination rates in the UK and Ireland dropped sharply, which was followed by significantly increased incidence of measles and mumps, resulting in deaths and severe and permanent injuries. Physicians, medical journals, and editors have described Wakefield's actions as fraudulent and tied them to epidemics and deaths, and a 2011 journal article described the vaccine-autism connection as the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years.

Jan Hendrik Schön scandal

Schön committed outright fraud. This is the most shocking example of scientific malfeasance by a physicist that I have seen thus far in my career. This fraud and its aftermath shook up the physics community and changed the way we discuss scientific ethics with our graduate students.

From Wikipedia's article on the Schön scandal:- (Note: no credit is claimed for this material. It is not my own work.)

Allegations and investigation

As recounted by Dan Agin in his book Junk Science, soon after Schön published his work on single-molecule semiconductors, others in the physics community alleged that his data contained anomalies. Lydia Sohn, then of Princeton University, noticed that two experiments carried out at very different temperatures had identical noise. When the editors of Nature pointed this out to Schön, he claimed to have accidentally submitted the same graph twice. Paul McEuen of Cornell University then found the same noise in a paper describing a third experiment. More research by McEuen, Sohn, and other physicists uncovered a number of examples of duplicate data in Schön's work. This triggered a series of reactions that quickly led Lucent Technologies (which ran Bell Labs) to start a formal investigation.

In May 2002, Bell Labs set up a committee to investigate with Malcolm Beasley of Stanford University as chair. The committee obtained information from all of Schön's coauthors, and interviewed the three principal ones (Zhenan Bao, Bertram Batlogg and Christian Kloc). It examined electronic drafts of the disputed papers which included processed numeric data. The committee requested copies of the raw data but found that Schön had kept no laboratory notebooks. His raw-data files had been erased from his computer. According to Schön the files were erased because his computer had limited hard drive space. In addition, all of his experimental samples had been discarded, or damaged beyond repair.

On September 25, 2002, the committee publicly released its report. The report contained details of 24 allegations of misconduct. They found evidence of Schön's scientific misconduct in at least 16 of them. They found that whole data sets had been reused in a number of different experiments. They also found that some of his graphs, which purportedly had been plotted from experimental data, had instead been produced using mathematical functions.

The report found that all of the misdeeds had been performed by Schön alone. All of the coauthors (including Bertram Batlogg who was the head of the team) were exonerated of scientific misconduct. This sparked widespread debate in the scientific community on how the blame for misconduct should be shared among co-authors, particularly when they share significant part of the credit.

Aftermath and sanctions

Schön acknowledged that the data were incorrect in many of these papers. He claimed that the substitutions could have occurred by honest mistake. He admitted to having falsified some data and stated he did so to show more convincing evidence for behaviour that he observed.

Experimenters at Delft University of Technology and the Thomas J. Watson Research Center have since performed experiments similar to Schön's. They did not obtain similar results. Even before the allegations had become public, several research groups had tried to reproduce most of his spectacular results in the field of the physics of organic molecular materials without success.

Schön returned to Germany and took a job at an engineering firm. In June 2004 the University of Konstanz issued a press release stating that Schön's doctoral degree had been revoked due to dishonourable conduct. Department of Physics spokesman Wolfgang Dieterich called the affair the biggest fraud in physics in the last 50 years and said that the credibility of science had been brought into disrepute. Schön appealed the ruling, but on October 28, 2009 it was upheld by the University. In response, Schön sued the University, and appeared in court to testify on September 23, 2010. The court overturned the University's decision on September 27, 2010 meaning that Schön can keep his doctoral degree. In November 2010 the University moved to appeal the court's ruling. The state court ruled in September 2011 that the university was correct in revoking his doctorate. The Federal Administrative Court upheld the state court's decision on 31 July 2013.

In October 2004, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, the German Research Foundation) Joint Committee announced sanctions against him. The former DFG post-doctorate fellow was deprived of his active right to vote in DFG elections or serve on DFG committees for an eight-year period. During that period, Schön will also be unable to serve as a peer reviewer or apply for DFG funds.

ClimateGate

This was a case of political ideologues backed by fossil fuel companies trying to discredit climate scientists -- including some of my colleagues here at the University of Toronto.

From Wikipedia's article on the Climatic Research Unit email controversy:- (Note: no credit is claimed for this material. It is not my own work.)

The Climatic Research Unit email controversy (also known as Climategate) began in November 2009 with the hacking of a server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) by an external attacker. Several weeks before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change, an unknown individual or group breached CRU's server and copied thousands of emails and computer files to various locations on the Internet.

The story was first broken by climate change critics on their blogs, with columnist James Delingpole popularising the term Climategate to describe the controversy. Climate change critics and others denying the significance of human caused climate change argued that the emails showed that global warming was a scientific conspiracy, in which they alleged that scientists manipulated climate data and attempted to suppress critics. The accusations were rejected by the CRU, who said that the emails had been taken out of context and merely reflected an honest exchange of ideas.

The mainstream media picked up the story as negotiations over climate change mitigation began in Copenhagen on 7 December. Because of the timing, scientists, policy makers, and public relations experts said that the release of emails was a smear campaign intended to undermine the climate conference. In response to the controversy, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released statements supporting the scientific consensus that the Earth's mean surface temperature had been rising for decades, with the AAAS concluding based on multiple lines of scientific evidence that global climate change caused by human activities is now underway...it is a growing threat to society.

Eight committees investigated the allegations and published reports, finding no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct. However, the reports called on the scientists to avoid any such allegations in the future by taking steps to regain public confidence in their work, for example by opening up access to their supporting data, processing methods and software, and by promptly honouring freedom of information requests. The scientific consensus that global warming is occurring as a result of human activity remained unchanged throughout the investigations.

Power Lines and Cancer

As we discussed in our Quantum Mechanics lectures, the PhotoElectric Effect proves why there is no danger to human health from electromagnetic waves (oodles of photons) used by radios, TVs, cellphones, wi-fi, and other devices that emit nonionizing radiation. It is a scandal of huge proportions how much public money and time has been wasted on people's simplistic fears of what they cannot see. Back last semester I promised you a more thorough discussion of this topic. Read on for the details -- I figure you should see at least one detailed explanation of how real scientists debunk pseudoscience!

Before diving in, you may wish to read a brief overview written by physics Prof. Robert L. Park of the University of Maryland at College Park, USA.

From QuackWatch's article on Power Lines and Cancer:- (Note: no credit is claimed for this material. It is the work of Dr. John W. Farley, Ph.D..)

Power Lines and Cancer: Nothing to Fear

John W. Farley, Ph.D.

The notion that electric power lines can cause cancer arose in 1979 with a single flawed epidemiogical study that created a stir. Subsequent epidemiologic and animal studies have failed to find a consistent and significant effect. No plausible mechanism linking power lines and cancer has been found. In recent years, the verdict from large-scale scientific studies has been conclusively negative, and scientific and medical societies have issued official statements that power lines are not a significant health risk. In short, there is nothing to worry about.

History

Childhood leukemia can be used as an indicator that radiation exposure is sufficient to cause illness, because radioactivity elevates rates of leukemia before it produce other forms of cancer. Consequently, childhood leukemia ought to be the easiest to detect. In 1979, two researchers, Nancy Wertheimer and Ed Leeper, published an article based on their own epidemiologic study, alleging that the incidence of childhood leukemia was higher in Denver neighborhoods that were near electric power lines [1]. Their article generated a flurry of other studies. The idea was picked up by Paul Brodeur, who wrote a frightening three-part article for The New Yorker that reached a large and influential audience. Subsequent books by Brodeur in 1989 and 1993 alleged that power lines were "Currents of Death" and that the power industry and the government were engaged in a cover-up [2,3]. The journal Microwave News has consistently echoed Brodeur's message.

The list of conditions purportedly related to electromagnetic fields has grown to include Alzheimer's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease, brain tumors, and breast cancer, and multiple chemical sensitivity. The alleged culprits include power lines, microwaves, radar, video display terminals (such as computer monitors), electric blankets, and household appliances in general. Because virtually everyone in developed countries is exposed to appliances that use 60 Hz power (50 Hz in Europe), this health scare would have been extremely important had it turned out to be valid.

By the mid-90s, at least 100 epidemiologic studies had been published. Most found no correlation between cancer and measured powerline magnetic fields in houses. The evidence accumulated that power lines are not a health risk. In 1995, the PBS-TV's Frontline aired a skeptical report, "Currents of Fear," that included interviews with Brodeur and his critics [4]. By this time, a number of high-level review panels has assessed the published studies. One prominent panel, assembled by the Oak Ridge Associated Universities, concluded:

" There is no convincing evidence in the published literature to support the contention that exposure to extremely low-frequency electric and magnetic fields generated by sources such as household appliances, video display terminals, and local power lines are demonstrable health hazards." [5]

Commenting on this report, Robert L. Park, Ph.D., executive director of the American Physical Society asked, "Will this report end the controversy? Of course not. An entire industry (including researchers) is now dependent on the fear of an EMF hazard." [6] In 1995, the society's executive council concluded:

The scientific literature and the reports of reviews by other panels show no consistent, significant link between cancer and power line fields. This literature includes epidemiological studies, research on biological systems, and analyses of theoretical interaction mechanisms. No plausible biophysical mechanisms for the systematic initiation or promotion of cancer by these power line fields have been identified. Furthermore, the preponderance of the epidemiological and biophysical/biological research findings have failed to substantiate those studies which have reported specific adverse health effects from exposure to such fields [7].

In 1996, a committee of the National Research Council concluded:

Based on a comprehensive evaluation of published studies relating to the effects of power frequency electric and magnetic fields on cells, tissues, and organisms (including humans), the conclusion of the committee is that the current body of evidence does not show that exposure to these fields presents a human-health hazard. Specifically, no conclusive and consistent evidence shows that exposures to residential electric and magnetic fields produce cancer, adverse neurobehavioral effects, or reproductive and developmental effects [8].

In 1997, the National Cancer Institute produced the largest epidemiological study to date, which found no association between childhood leukemia and either wiring codes or measured magnetic fields [9]. The New England Journal of Medicine published the results together with an editorial calling for an end to wasting money on EMF research [10].

In 1999, The Lancet published a population case-control study covering the whole of England, Wales, and Scotland. All children diagnosed with leukemia or other childhood cancer during the previous four years were eligible. Each case was matched with two controls randomly selected for gender and date of birth from government registries. In the main study, 3838 cases and 7629 controls were interviewed. The EMF part of the study included only one control per case, and household EMF measurements and school measurements where relevant were taken on 2226 matched pairs. The measurements, adjusted for historical line load and appliance fields, were used to estimate average exposure in the year before the date of diagnosis, or an equivalent date for controls. To ensure that the EMF doses found inside the homes were the same as absorbed by the children, 100 of the children wore monitors for one week periods, three times a year. The study found no evidence that exposure to magnetic fields associated with the electricity supply increased risks for childhood leukemia, cancers of the central nervous system, or any other childhood cancer [11].

The Science

Thus, even though very hard to prove a universal negative, there have been so many studies over two decades that it is virtually certain that any significant hazard would have been discovered by now. The critics make a number of very telling points.

1. The fields produced by power lines are very small. Power lines produce both electric and magnetic fields. The electric field is greatly reduced in magnitude within the human body, because the body is an electrical conductor. In fact, power lines produce electric fields inside the human body that are much smaller than the electric fields that normally exist in the body. The magnetic field is not significantly shielded inside the human body, so the only realistic possibility of health effects come from the magnetic field. The magnetic fields from power lines are rather small. Typically they are about 2 milliGauss. By comparison, the earth's field is typically 300-500 milliGauss, with the exact value depending on the location on the surface of the earth. Magnetic fields from power lines are therefore hundreds of times smaller than the magnetic field from the earth. If the relatively weak magnetic fields from power lines had significant adverse health effects, you would expect the much stronger magnetic field from earth to be devastating. Yet no such effect has ever been found. In experiments on animals, mice have lived for several generations in 60 Hz magnetic fields as high as 10,000 milliGauss, thousands of times higher typical power line fields, without any adverse effects.

It is well known that fluctuating magnetic fields give rise to an electric field by the Faraday effect in physics. Yale physics professor Robert Adair demonstrated that these electric fields are very small in comparison with the naturally occurring electric fields arising from thermal fluctuations [12]. This is a good benchmark to indicate that the powerline magnetic fields can't be important.

2. No plausible mechanism for adverse health effects has been postulated. It is well known that electromagnetic fields at high frequencies (e.g., ultraviolet light) can have adverse biological effects. This is why sunlight is a good disinfectant: it kills bacteria. However, the frequency of power line fields (60 cycles per second, or 60 Hz) is too low to have this effect by many orders of magnitude.

3. The initial study was flawed. Wertheimer and Leeper did not actually measure magnetic fields from power lines. Instead, they classified the homes according to their wiring code. The wiring code was then used as a surrogate for the powerline magnetic field, which was unmeasured and unknown. This is a flaw in the study. Later studies actually measured the magnetic fields from power lines and found no consistent relationship between measured magnetic field and incidence of cancer [13]. It is important to realize that there are important possible confounding factors in such epidemiologic studies. For example, one possible confounding factor is an income effect. Living right under electric power lines is not a desired residence, and often is a low-income housing location. People living near power lines tend to be poorer than the control group, and there is a strong and well-known epidemiological relationship between poverty and cancer. Gurney and others showed that the homes with the presumably higher-current wiring code tended to be lower income [14]. Thus the original Wertheimer-Leeper study was biased. In addition, it was based on a relatively few cases, and the statistics were consequently rather poor.

Later epidemiologic studies were properly designed, and some were much larger in scale. For example, the government of Finland performed a huge study of 134,800 children, with one million person-years of exposure. There were 140 cancers in the group, 5 fewer than would be expected by chance [15].

Consequently, the epidemiologic studies, taken as a whole, consist of a few early low-quality studies, some of which yielded positive effects, and later, higher-quality studies, which yielded negative studies. If power lines really caused cancer, it is natural to expect the later studies to confirm the earlier studies. Instead, this has all the earmarks of a nonexistent effect.

4. The incidence of leukemia has been decreasing. During the last few decades, the use of electric power and electric appliances has increased the 60 Hz powerline magnetic fields to which we Americans are exposed by roughly a factor of twenty. If power line fields were a significant cause of leukemia, there should have been a dramatic rise in leukemia. Leukemia rates, however, have slowly decreased. As noted by the physicist J.D. Jackson, this argues against any significant causal relationship [16].

Vested Interests

Once the health scare was started in a big way, a number of factors have kept it going.

The world's first meter to address the health issues associated with the cellular phone and EMF power line controversies. Learn to detect and measure: cellular phone RF radiation, electromagnetic fields generated by power lines, computer monitors, TVs, appliances, home wiring, and other unsuspected sources. The key to EMF avoidance is detection. Now for the first time, detection is made affordable by CellSensor, the hand-held, battery-operated, guaranteed-accurate EMF detector. . . . It lets you instantly measure the levels in your environment, and helps you make informed purchasing decisions regarding appliances.

In 1998, a 30-person panel convened by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS - a component of the National Institutes of Health) concluded—by a 19-9 vote—that electric and magnetic fields like those surrounding electric power lines should be regarded as a "possible human carcinogen." [20] Although described by NIEHS as as "an international panel of experts," the panel included the editor of Microwave News and several other well-known promoters of an EMF-cancer link. Dr. Robert L. Park said that most of the panelists have staked their reputations on such a link [21].

I believe that the panel's conclusion was not based on new data but represents a political effort to prevent the cutoff of research funds. Indeed, its chairperson declared:

This report does not suggest that the risk is high. It is probably quite small, compared to many other public health risks. However, I strongly believe that additional hypothesis-driven, focused research should be pursued to reduce uncertainties in this area [20].

In June 1999, the NIH Office of Research Integrity announced that Robert P. Liburdy, Ph.D., a former staff biochemist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, had engaged in scientific misconduct by intentionally falsifying and fabricating data and claims about purported cellular effects of EMF reported reported in two scientific papers [22]. The papers [23,24]. published in 1992, had reported data indicating that EMF exert a biological effect by altering the entry of calcium across a cell's surface membrane. These claims were potentially important because they purported to link EMF and calcium signaling, a fundamental cell process governing many important cellular functions.

The Bottom Line

The power line "issue" illustrates how persistent a health scare can be when promoted by an author who tells a frightening tale. The power-line scare has certain things in common with other health scares: Magnetic fields are not understood by the public. Nor can they be felt, tasted, seen, or touched. This makes them mysterious, easily portrayable as threatening, and profitable to their advocates.

References

  1. Wertheimer N, Leeper E. Electrical wiring configurations and childhood cancer. American Journal of Epidemiology 109:273-284, 1979.
  2. Brodeur P. Currents of Death: Power Lines, Computer Terminals, and the Attempt to Cover Up the Threat to Your Health. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.
  3. Brodeur P. The Great Power Line Cover-Up: How the Utilities and Government Are Trying to Hide the Cancer Hazard Posed by Electromagnetic Fields. (Little-Brown, 1993, hardback). There is also a 1995 paperback edition.
  4. PBS Frontline. Currents of Fear. Program #1319, originally aired June 13, 1995.
  5. Davis JG and others. Health Effects of Low-Frequency Electric and Magnetic Fields. Oak Ridge Associated Universities, 1992.
  6. Park RL. Review panel exonerates low frequency electromagnetic fields. What's New, Nov. 20, 1992.
  7. American Physical Society, Executive Council Statement, April 23, 1995.
  8. National Research Council Committee on the Possible Effects of Electromagnetic Fields on Biologic Systems. Possible Health Effects of Exposure to Residential Electric and Magnetic Fields. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1997. [Press release] [Complete book]
  9. Linet MS and others. Residential exposure to magnetic fields and acute lymphoblastic leukemia in children. New England Journal of Medicine 337:1-7, 1997.
  10. Campion EW. Power lines, cancer, and fear. New England Journal of Medicine 337:44-46, 1997.
  11. Day N. Exposure to power-frequency magnetic fields and the risk of childhood cancer. Lancet 354:1925-1931, 1999.
  12. Adair RK. Constraints on biological effects of weak extremely-low-frequency electromagnetic fields. Physics Review A43:1039-1048, 1991.
  13. Savitz DA and others. Case-control study of childhood cancer and exposure to 60-Hz magnetic fields. American Journal of Epidemiology 128, 21-38, 1988.
  14. Gurney JG and others. Childhood cancer occurrence in relation to power line configurations: A study of potential selection bias in case-control studies. Epidemiology 6:31-35, 1995.
  15. Verkasalo PJ and others. Risk of cancer in Finnish children living close to power lines. British Medical Journal 307:895-899, 1993.
  16. Jackson JD. Are the stray 60-Hz electromagnetic fields associated with the distribution and use of electric power a significant cause of cancer? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 89:3508-3510, 1992. [Jackson authored a well-known graduate physics textbook in electromagnetism.]
  17. Brodeur P. The Zapping of America: Microwaves, Their Deadly Risk, and the Coverup. (Norton, 1977).
  18. Morgan JLG. EMF emerges as high-voltage litigation. Issues of Injury, Summer, 1994.
  19. Hafmeister D. Background Paper on Power Line Fields and Public Health, March 29, 1996.
  20. Environmental Health Institute report concludes evidence is 'weak' that electric and magnetic fields cause cancer. NIEHS press release #9-99, June 15, 1999. The full text of the report is available in HTML and PDF versions.
  21. Park RL. EMF: Health panel exhumes remains of power-line controversy. What's New? July 3, 1998.
  22. Findings of scientific misconduct. NIH Guide, June 18, 1999. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
  23. Liburdy RP. Biological interactions of cellular systems with time-varying magnetic fields. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 649:74-95, 1992.
  24. Liburdy RP. Calcium signaling in lymphocytes and ELF fields. Evidence for an electric field metric and a site of interaction involving the calcium ion channel. FEBS Letters 301:53-59, 1992.

For Additional Information

Dr. Farley is Professor of Physics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He has never been employed by the electric power industry, or by its research organization, EPRI. He can be reached on the Internet or by email.

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This article was revised on July 27, 2003.