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Questionable herpes vaccine research backed by tech heavyweight Peter Thiel may have jeopardized $15 million in federal research funding to Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. That's according to documents obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request by The State Journal Register.
In August, Kaiser Health News reported that Thiel and other conservative investors had contributed $7 million for the live-but-weakened herpes virus vaccine, developed by the late SIU researcher William Halford. The investments came after Halford and his private company, Rational Vaccines, had begun conducting small clinical trials in the Caribbean nation of St. Kitts and Nevis. With the off-shore location, Rational Vaccines' trial skirted federal regulations and standard safety protocols for human trials, including having approval and oversight from an institutional review board (IRB).
Experts were quick to call the unapproved trial "patently unethical," and researchers rejected the data from publication, calling the handling of safety issues "reckless." The government of St. Kitts opened an investigation into the trial and reported that health authorities there had been kept in the dark.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by acid andy on Thursday November 16 2017, @06:10PM (15 children)
In science, data is data, surely? How many modern technnologies, especially in medicine, were built on knowledge gained in the past through deeply unethical practises? If this is the way you feel, surely all those data should be ignored too and all studies redone with an ethical-only grounding?
If a scientific study causes participants (voluntary or otherwise) a certain amount of harm, surely striking out the results renders that harm pointless? Worse, there's a good chance similar harms may end up being repeated, once they happen in a context that people are happy to label as sufficiently "ethical".
That said, I don't agree with what was done.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @06:31PM (4 children)
I think the deciding factor is that herpes is no big deal. Sure, we all (er, 2/3rds of us) would like to not have to worry about it, but it's a manageable cosmetic issue.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @07:12PM
Fuck that. Get rid of it, now. It's disgusting and rancid.
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Thursday November 16 2017, @07:13PM (2 children)
Herpes is, or appears to frequently be, a factor tending to lead to cancer. I wouldn't say it's "no big thing". That said, IIUC it hides inside neurons sometimes for decades before emerging. And, of course, it comes in multiple varieties. *Some* of them probably actually are "no big thing". Others are delayed action explosives. And one vaccine probably won't handle all the varieties.
Google got me to:
http://justherpes.com/facts/how-long-does-herpes-lie-dormant/ [justherpes.com]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4353788 [nih.gov] --Javascript required
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday November 16 2017, @08:43PM (1 child)
I think the herpes link may have been discredited - your pubmed paper is from 1973, and everything more recent I found with a quick search says there is no such link.
HPV on the other hand has a solidly confirmed link to cancer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @09:21PM
i would hazard to suggest that it was HPV back then that caused the cancer, but herpes is what was blamed.
HPV had only recently been discovered as both an STD and known causation of cancer in people. More populary, such cancers were attributed to different lifestyle choices--but choices that sadly very much coincided with the spread of the hpv virus.
The morality view quick to blame the drinking and partying and smoking as the causes as opposed to what happened during those drunken smoke filled parties.
(Score: 3, Touché) by tibman on Thursday November 16 2017, @06:46PM (2 children)
It would be bad to create an incentive to do unethical science. If "data is data" then strip all names (and credit) from the data.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday November 16 2017, @07:22PM (1 child)
If actual harm IS done, then be sure that names and credit for the harm IS or BECOMES associated with the data set.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by deimtee on Friday November 17 2017, @01:33AM
No, data is data. If harm is done, then penalize the people who did the harm.
You can even make the penalty so big that others are dissuaded from unethical research, but throwing out the data once you have it is making that harm worse by rendering it pointless.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 5, Informative) by sbgen on Thursday November 16 2017, @06:53PM (2 children)
Here is the link to the reviewer's report, (PDF) <https://liveherpesvaccine.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/peer-review-of-halford-manuscript-dec-2016.pdf>
Warning: Not a computer expert, but got to use it. Yes, my kind does exist.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday November 16 2017, @07:12PM (1 child)
Sounds like a classic RTFA moment then.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by sbgen on Thursday November 16 2017, @07:21PM
To be fair to you, the link was within another link. Fortunately I do this all day :-)) Also, it is unlikely that a scientific paper will be flatly rejected *just* for ethics reason or for being of a particular political belief.
Warning: Not a computer expert, but got to use it. Yes, my kind does exist.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday November 16 2017, @07:06PM (1 child)
Do you trust data from "reckless" scientists?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday November 16 2017, @07:15PM
Not really.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday November 16 2017, @07:17PM
In science, data is data, surely?
No. There's a such thing as "bad data": data that's been tampered with or just plain made-up.
If you could somehow guarantee that data obtained unethically was actually accurate, then your point would be sound. But if the accuracy of the data is highly questionable (which is what happens when the methodology is questionable), then the data is basically worthless.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday November 17 2017, @10:27AM
An earlier poster has already Godwin'd this thread, so I'll point out that research from concentration camps is probably the canonical (though far more exteme) example of when this has happened before. Most of the medical community refused to use any of the results (it turns out you can get quite a lot of information about biology if you don't care if your subjects die / suffer excruciating pain). The reasoning was twofold: first, they didn't want to provide a justification for war criminals to claim that their work had saved more lives than it had harmed. Second, they didn't want to encourage people to repeat these atrocities in the future.
Ethics aside, there's another, more pragmatic, argument for ignoring this data. In recent years, pharmaceutical companies have been caught cherry picking trials. It's a variation of an old stock-market scam that goes as follows: You set up 20 trials comparing an ineffective drug against a placebo. As a result of random statistical variation, the drug will perform better than the placebo in some and worse in others. You quietly forget about the ones where it performed worse and publish the ones where it performed better. As a result of this, the FDA now requires that all drug trials be registered before they take place, including a lot of information about the participants and so on. It sounds as if this trial didn't do any of this, so the results are highly suspect.
sudo mod me up