Professor who criticized prostate screening seminar did not suffer retaliation, says university

A medical school professor was not subjected to retaliation after he raised concerns about a university seminar promoting routine prostate cancer screening, an internal review has found.

Michael Wilkes, a former vice dean for medical education and now director of Global Health, a research and policy institute, and professor of medicine at the University of California, Davis, wrote about his concerns in an editorial published online in the San Francisco Chronicle on 30 September 2010, with Jerome R Hoffman, emeritus professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.1

The editorial criticized a seminar at Davis promoting prostate cancer screening that was supported by Intuitive Surgical, manufacturer of the da Vinci robot used to perform prostatectomies.

After Wilkes raised his concerns he received an email from the executive associate dean at the medical school stating that Wilkes would …