Intended for healthcare professionals

Rapid response to:

Feature Whistleblowing

Name and shame

BMJ 2009; 339 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.b2693 (Published 24 July 2009) Cite this as: BMJ 2009;339:b2693

Rapid Response:

When whistleblowing results in the guilty being exonerated and the innocent losing their jobs

In an article published in the BMJ three years ago (1) I blew the
whistle on Asim Kurjak, a professor of obstetrics at the University of
Zagreb, who is a recurrent plagiarist. I first drew his plagiarism to the
attention of his university in the early 1990s, but was asked to be
discrete about his scientific misconduct. When I discovered early this
century that Kurjak had continued to plagiarise, I felt it was time to
make his misconduct public. My allegations have been substantiated by a
ministry enquiry in Croatia.

Unlike the whistleblowers described in Jane Cassidy’s recent article
(2), I have not suffered any retribution for blowing the whistle on
Kurjak. However, others have suffered, but not the proven culprit.
Whereas Kurjak has been exonerated by Nada Cikes, the dean of the medical
school, and her colleagues, others have been ruthlessly victimised. Partly
because it was wrongly assumed that the editors-in-chief of the Croatian
Medical Journal – Matko and Ana Marusic – had helped me to write my
article, they have been the target of repeated abuse, including demands
that Matko Marusic be assessed psychiatrically because he had drawn public
attention to corruption at the University of Zagreb. The Marusics have
not been the only indirect casualties of my whistleblowing: Natasa
Skaricic, a journalist who covered the scandal, has been sacked, and
Mirjana Juricic, the judge who ruled that the demand that Matko Marusic be
examined psychiatrically was an illegal attack on his human rights, is
facing disciplinary action.

These damaging ramifications of my whistleblowing have naturally
prompted me to consider whether I should have drawn attention to Kurjak’s
scientific misconduct. I have witnessed the power of the University of
Zagreb to acquiesce in evidence of the scientific misconduct of one of its
most senior faculty, and instead divert attention away from this by
attacking others.

As the examples used in Jane Cassidy’s article make clear,
whistleblowers take risks with their own careers when exposing misconduct
and corruption. But whistleblowers like me run no personal risk can
clearly inadvertently put innocent others at risk. The experience has
certainly left me more cautious about drawing attention to the corruption
that appears to pervade so much of medical academia today.

References

1. Chalmers I. Role of systematic reviews in detecting plagiarism:
case of Asim
Kurjak. BMJ 2006;333:594-596.

2. Cassidy J. Name and shame. BMJ 2009;339:264-67.

Competing interests:
None declared

Competing interests: No competing interests

03 August 2009
Iain Chalmers
Editor, James Lind Library
Oxford OX2 7LG