Editor's Choice | This Week in BMJ | Press releases
BMJ No 7103 Volume 315 News Saturday 2 August 1997
ME researcher accused of cooking the booksAn authority on chronic fatigue syndrome has been accused of "cooking" the results of research linking the syndrome to organo-phosphates in a case awaiting judgment in the High Court in London.Peter Behan, professor of neurology at Glasgow University and honorary consultant neurologist to teaching hospitals in Glasgow, admitted there was an error in a paper published last year in the Journal of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine. Professor Behan was an expert witness for John Hill, a former farm worker bringing a test case for compensation for organophosphate poisoning. Mr Hill is claiming £180,000 ($302,000) compensation from William Tomkins Limited, which farms Spar Farm, near Peterborough in Cambridgeshire. More than 60 other claims over organophosphate poisoning are pending, most involving exposure to sheep dip. Professor Behan's paper - Chronic fatigue syndrome as a delayed reaction to chronic low-dose organophosphate exposure - was the only one produced during the case to link chronic fatigue syndrome with organophosphate poisoning. The paper compares 10 agricultural workers exposed to organophosphates with "10 healthy males," all of whom were said to have been subjected to a range of tests, including one in which prolactin levels were measured before and after the subject was given buspirone. Buspirone was said to have produced a modest increase in prolactin in the controls but a significant increase in the patients. But Professor Behan admitted in evidence that the controls were actually 15 men and 15 women and were hospital staff used as controls for a PhD thesis by a lecturer in his department. Crossexamined by Jeremy Stuart-Smith QC, for William Tomkins, he agreed it was "quite wrong" to take the controls from the thesis, describe them as 10 men, and put them into the paper. But he said that it was not done deliberately and pointed out that the results would have been even more significant if the controls had all been men. During his evidence, Professor Behan had told the judge, Mrs Justice Smith, that some of the controls were farmers. When Mr Stuart-Smith put it to him that his evidence to the judge about the controls was "patently untrue," he replied: "Correct." The judge said the defendants criticised experts in the case "on the basis that those who have a passionate interest in a particular field may sometimes lose their objectivity." She added: "I think perhaps it has been made good in the case of Professor Behan." Professor Behan told the BMJ that he had made "a genuine mistake" over the controls in his paper. "An error crept in and we used 15 men and 15 women, healthy people, as controls. It in no way interferes with the results. With 10 men there would have been a significant difference [between the patients and the controls], a bigger difference."
Clare Dyer,
Home | Current issue | Past issues | Classified ads | Career Focus | Feedback Collections | About this site | About the BMJ | BMA | Medline
|