SOMETHING SMELLS in the retracted Ecstasy study that I mentioned here earlier. Mark Kleiman has more:
The experiment was purportedly intended to represent in an animal model the consequences of human “recreational” MDMA use, and perhaps of therapeutic use of the drug were it ever approved for that purpose. In the experiment, two out of fifteen animals died. The death rate among human MDMA users is no more than one in a million.
Yet it appears that the researchers failed to investigate the causes of those deaths. Moreover, they went on to draw inferences about the effects of MDMA on humans from the observed damage to the brains of the eight remaining animals. That didn’t seem to trouble the reviewers for Science or the administrators at the National Institute on Drug Abuse who trumpeted the findings as evidence of the dangers of MDMA. (Science is published by the AAAS, whose president, Alan Leshner, was the Director of NIDA when the grant in question was awarded; he made MDMA his particular crusade.)
It is hard to escape the thought that many of the people involved were less cautious than they might have been because the results seemed to support their already strongly-held beliefs.
Okay, but that’s not misconduct. That can happen to anyone, and happens to pretty much all of us now and then. But there’s more:
Even before the retraction, then, Ricaurte’s work was under a cloud. One very senior figure in the field had said in an open scientific meeting “I will believe any result George Ricaurte comes up with as soon as it has been independently confirmed.”
The other detail not mentioned in the retraction letter is that Peter Jennings had gotten wind of the controversy, and had a special highly critical of Ricaurte’s work “in the can” and ready to show. (Ricaurte had refused to be interviewed.) That Ricaurte’s group had failed to replicate the now-retracted work is no doubt true; but that the paper would have been retracted had ABC not been ready to make an issue of it is much less clear.
I don’t have Kleiman’s expertise in this area, but I think this demands further investigation. Read all of Kleiman’s post, which contains much more information.