Mr. JOHNSTON. Dr. Rennie-one question I have right now, of the 9 publications that you supervise, how many articles would you say are published each year? Dr. LUNDBERG. We have 10 journals, JAMA and nine specialty journals. The number of articles per year would probably be in the order of, oh, perhaps 3,000. Mr. JOHNSTON. Okay, thank you. Dr. LUNDBERG. Estimate. Mr. JOHNSTON. Okay, Dr. Rennie. TESTIMONY OF DR. DRUMMOND RENNIE, DEPUTY EDITOR (WEST), “JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION" (JAMA) AND ADJUNCT PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO, CA Dr. RENNIE. My name is Drummond Rennie. You have heard who I am, what I do. I am very grateful, gratified to be here. I have an extended statement which I offer to you for the record in the interest of time because I had a guest staying this weekend, Dr. Leon Lederman, head of the Fermilab, 99 whom I believe is wellknown to this Committee, and I promised him not to delay the Subcommittee and prevent you from voting for his Superconducting Super Collider. [Laughter.] Now, as you may see from my written statement, I have been personally Mr. JOHNSTON. That may come up very shortly, Dr. Rennie. I have, as an editor, been personally tricked by or involved with a number of celebrated scientific cheats, four of them familiar to members of the Congress and two of them, Long and Soman, 100 to this very Subcommittee, and like you, I want to do everything possible to prevent this happening again. I guess it is one thing to publish unwittingly error and another thing completely to publish unwittingly fraud or, as the Supreme Court might have it, one thing to be indecent and another thing to be obscene. Now, like Dr. Lundberg, I emphasize that this is a rapidly evolving field. Over the past year I have become a "Fraudie" attending eight vigorous argumentative workshops on this subject. This is certainly proof, at any rate, of concern on the part of the scientific community with the problem. But though progress has been made, it is essential that members of this Subcommittee know that no one as yet has worked out the best method for the detection and prevention of fraud or for responding to allegations of misconduct. Indeed, they haven't agreed upon any universally accepted policy, though the Institute of Medicine and the Association of American Universities, their contributions are certainly thoughtful. The Institute of Medicine one, for example. I was invited to contribute to their discussions and strongly endorse their preventive 99 Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL. 100 See Appendix 9-A. Dr. Rennie also refers to the 1981 Subcommittee hearings cited in note 1, supra. approach to the idea of scientific-to scientific misconduct 101 has been the correct one. We all agree that 102 the research institutions are where good research has to be taught, has to be monitored, fraud detected, and fraud punished. However, until the institutions all grasp this rather simple point and until fraud ceases to exist, I believe that journals could assist more actively than the Institute of Medicine report might imply. I believe also that the editor of a scientific journal, if he is to run a successful scientific enterprise and if he is to promote science in the widest sense, must have complete freedom. This freedom is one reason for the phenomenal success of the scientific enterprise in the United States, and I am distrustful of rules imposed upon journals unless they are the product of a heavy consensus of editors. I am very dubious of the workability of a bureaucratic solution and feel that to tie editors up in any new bureaucracy will be to damage the scientific process, which depends critically upon unusual, inventive, unshackled scientists working in harmony with unusual, inventive, and unshackled editors, and I have got two of those on my left and one on my right. Editors already know that they stand or fall on the reputations their journals achieve, and their reputations are certainly unlikely to survive repeated episodes of phony publication. I have a number of suggestions, by no means all of them original with me, and these are predicated on the following pragmatic assumptions. As you have heard from John Maddox, editorial peer review will not detect misconduct except by chance. I describe the process in the formal statement that I have offered to you, sir. I offer for inclusion in this Record an editorial I wrote that summarizes many of the questions we have about the process of editorial peer review and also the abstracts of papers presented at the conference that Dr. Lundberg has just told you of.103 The editorial review system works well when the questions being asked of it are the questions of science, and it fails completely when it is asked to detect misconduct. We all have anecdotes about, for example, plagiarism being unveiled because the plagiarized author happens to have been sent a manuscript for review, and the Soman case, which was discussed by this very Subcommittee in 1981 is a classic example of that. That was a case at Yale. But reviewers and editors can't function unless they assume honesty. To assume dishonesty, if you think about it, would mean that they would have to take on an enormous staff of professional investigators to check every fact in every submitted manuscript, and so we find that misconduct is almost always detected in the fraudulent worker's institution by his own colleagues. 101 Dr. Rennie amends his statement to read "idea of scientific misconduct. This approach to scientific misconduct . . ." 102 Dr. Rennie adds the words "it's in" after. "We all agree that." 103 See the supplemental materials following Dr. Rennie's prepared statement. As I have said in paper that I gave, to a skilled cheat the editor is a mark, a dupe, a patsy, and then becomes an accessory, and he is a hopeless flat-foot when it comes to investigation. And it is very hard to see how the present peer review system could be made into a better policing function, particularly if scientists don't have the training, the expertise, or the temperament to be policemen and those involved in the review system are necessarily completely removed from the scene of the crime, if any. The other thing is: the system is working pretty well, it seems, and if we make changes in it, we do it at our peril. Now, in my written statement I have listed 11 suggestions to address the problem. These are my suggestions. They are not yet policy anywhere. They have to do with affixing responsibility for authorship; in other words, for accountability. They have to do with retention of data, about which we have heard something. They have to do with cooperation between journals and research institutions, including sharing of information about frauds and cheats. They have to do with sanctions against cheats, including the official recognition that all the previous work of proven frauds is suspect, which I think is a pragmatic and useful approach. Also, the correction of the literature and retraction and an experimental confidential audit of papers to establish the prevalence of gross misconduct so that our response should be appropriately measured. And I would like to offer into the record a recent editorial I wrote on this last topic. 104 Like Barbara Mishkin-and I would certainly wish that it would not be misconduct to claim her statement as my own-like her, I ask that Members of this Subcommittee encourage the legal protection of editors and journals who wish in good faith to publish retractions. Earlier I said we would make changes to the system at our peril, and this is a major issue. It is nice and lawyerly to set up a mechanism that would deal with just one case, but to me it seems more logical to adjust our response to the actual problem and not merely the perceived problem. We should change the system that has worked so very well only if an investigation shows us that we have enough misconduct to justify it. Scientists, who trust their fellows because the whole fabric of science comes apart without trust, keep reiterating that the prevalence of misconduct is very small. That happens to be my bias. If I were on this Committee, however, I would ask the defenders of science for scientific evidence that the prevalence of fraud was low, and if I were a dean, I would want the same evidence because my institution's response should surely be in proportion to the problem. To resolve the stand-off between those who allege that cheating is common and wish to impose a Federal bureaucracy to police it 104 The editorial follows Dr. Rennie's prepared statement. and those who say it is nonexistent, or almost so, I have proposed that we find out the prevalence of the grossest forms of misconduct in clinical research. In my statement and in the editorial I have talked about, I have given the details. I emphasize that the audit would be an experiment, it would be limited. The details regarding any particular paper would never be made public, since the object would only be to establish prevalence, not to punish, nor would it concern itself with the adjudication of subtle and complex scientific issues. As recommended by the AAAS-ABA National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists, 105 I urge that immunity from defamation actions be sought for persons investigating and reporting in good faith on this problem. I hope that this Subcommittee would encourage such an experiment and encourage such protection. I repeat that the object of doing such an audit would be to be able to advise, and advise in a credible manner, the medical-clinical research institutions on their 106 need, if any, to carry out internal audits and tighten up their procedures. Indeed, if the prevalence is less than, say, one in a thousand papers being fraudulent, I think we should all stop worrying about it and do nothing beyond putting pressure on the institutions to educate, to set up good research practices, and to deal with those cases that are brought to their attention. I am very much against the setting up of any Federal bureaucracy to carry out random audits. Like Congressman Walker earlier, I am against Federal truth police. I entirely agree with the Institute of Medicine's report in 107 that issue, but I certainly think that it would be worthwhile having an experimental audit. I believe that though the response of institutions has often been slow, self-serving, and devious, their attention has finally been engaged, and I believe that if the institutions are convinced of the extent of the problem they will deal with it because the solution has to be and should be in their hands. Thank you, sir, for your attention, and I will be happy to answer any questions. [The complete prepared statement of Dr. Rennie follows:] 105 See note 61, supra. 106 Dr. Rennie amends his statement to read "medical-clinical research institutions on the need 107 Dr. Rennie changes the word "in" to "on." |