Science in the Triangle

Arrived at the National Institutes of Health for the “Medicine in the Media” course just in time to learn that money paid to researchers with a conflict of interest attracts more attention than bad science resulting from their work.

The first session of the three-day course was about the lung cancer researcher Claudia Henschke who accepted $3.6 million from a cigarette maker. The payments were not disclosed when the New England Journal of Medicine published a study by Henschke in 2006 that suggested doctors should screen differently for early lung cancer detection.

The Cancer Letter, a monthly newsletter on research, training and public education, doggedly followed the story for two years until the New York Times picked it up last year. While the Cancer Letter dove not only into the conflict of interest issues of the payments but also into the flaws of the study, the New York Times only wrote about the money, Gardiner Harris, the NYT reporter who wrote the stories, acknowledged.

Turns out the study, which looked at CT scans to detect lesions that may become cancerous, had a high rate of false positives and the number of deaths among patients who weren’t treated was off. Early skeptics, according to the Cancer Letter, included David Ransohoff, an expert in cancer prevention at the University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Ned Patz, professor of radiology, pharmacology and cancer biology at Duke University.