Oslo promises crackdown after cancer cheat scandal
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Norway promised on Monday to speed up a new law that may bring jail terms for medical cheats after a hospital accused one of its cancer researchers of falsifying data published in a leading journal.
“There must be no doubt about the quality of our research,” Health Minister Sylvia Brustad told Norway’s NTB news agency. “So we are speeding up our draft law.”
The government would present the law to parliament later this year, earlier than planned, after experts have worked on a review since 2003.
The law would propose stricter rules for overseeing research and might make cheats liable to criminal charges that could bring jail terms. Under existing rules, cheats can in the worst case be sacked and banned from practicing medicine.
Officials said at the weekend that 44-year-old Jon Sudbo, a researcher at Oslo’s Radium Hospital, made up patients’ case histories for a study about oral cancer published by the British journal The Lancet in October.
The hospital said an independent commission would probe all his research. Sudbo is on a sick leave and has not been available for comment.
“They will start the work mid-week. Hopefully they will give us answers in one to two months,” said Stein Vaaler, a hospital director.
Among improbabilities in Sudbo’s research, 250 of about 900 supposed patients were listed with the same date of birth.
Last year, South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk was exposed for fabricating two studies claiming he had cloned human embryos to provide stem cells.
NOT RETROACTIVE
Any new Norwegian law making it a criminal offence to falsify data could not apply to Sudbo. “A law would not have retroactive effect,” Deputy Health Minister Wegard Harsvik told Reuters.
Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, said the report published in October would be retracted if Oslo supplied confirmation that it had been falsified.
The hospital’s Vaaler said a retraction would be made quickly if the researcher admitted in writing to inventing the data. “So far he has admitted falsifying data verbally,” he said.
“There are huge implications for the entire scientific community to make sure that it has the best safety checks in place to prevent fabrication and falsification of data,” Horton told Reuters.
The panel investigating Sudbo’s research would look at why errors were not spotted by a peer review.
Horton defended the current system of peer review but said the competitive nature of scientific research probably contributed in both the Norwegian and South Korean cases.
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