Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [46]
One investigator collects data by assigning her students research tasks. If something publishable comes up, she asks her ethics board for permission to use data she has already collected for ‘nonresearch purposes’. A neat side-step. Another asks her review board for permission to collect data – but doesn’t bother waiting for a reply before beginning the process. Yet another omits and distorts elements of his research projects that might cause raised eyebrows on the ethics board.
Then there is the ‘prolific publisher’ who doesn’t bother with the review board because it is a ‘rigid and antiscientist authority’. And the investigator who didn’t like the changes the board had suggested; he went ahead with the study and declared that he had the ethics review board’s support when he submitted it for publication.
It doesn’t end there. Keith-Spiegel and Koocher’s paper mentions the revenge that scientists take on their ethics board: one investigator found himself in a position to deny promotion to a member of his ethics board who had refused to sanction his research protocol. ‘The investigator confided with a degree of smugness that revenge tastes sweeter served up cold,’ said Keith-Spiegel and Koocher. Others ‘expressed the belief that their deceitful actions were fully justified and necessary in the interest of continuing their contributions to science unfettered’.
In the minds of scientists, science must advance. The truth is that regulation is most likely slowing the pace of progress, according to New York Times writer Lawrence K. Altman. ‘Who knows how many beneficial drugs are being withheld from the public or remain undiscovered because curious scientists are inhibited from following their scientific instincts?’ he asks.
The interesting thing is that scientists have always found a way round such barriers. Altman has written the definitive history of this phenomenon, engagingly entitled Who Goes First?. It is packed with tales of anarchic avoidance of the ‘proper’ way to do research, and proves that, because they are hell-bent on advancing science, scientists can always find one willing research subject: themselves.
The procedure pioneered by Werner Forssmann has probably saved the life of someone you know. Every year, millions of people undergo cardiac catheterisation. It is the standard way to look at how the heart is functioning after a heart attack, chest pain or other indications of a heart problem. A description of the procedure is enough to make you wince: a small cut is made in an artery – often near the groin – and a tube is pushed in, all the way to the heart. It’s certainly not the kind of thing you would want to do to yourself.
Forssmann’s story began in 1929, when he saw drawings that showed veterinarians accessing a horse’s heart via its jugular vein. At the time, the heart was off-limits. Expose it, even touch it, received wisdom said, and a patient would surely die. It was a sensible view: we now know that the touch of a foreign body on the lining of the heart wall can disrupt the cardiac rhythms, causing instant death. But Forssmann was frustrated by the impasse. Little was known of how the heart worked – or of what could go wrong with it. He reasoned that if you could somehow get access to the heart via a vein, then we might learn at least something of its workings. Perhaps we could even use a tube to deliver drugs or fluids directly to the heart.
Forssmann may have had the idea, but he did not have the authority. He was an intern in a small hospital in Eberswalde,