Category: Blogs

Fraudulently Doctored Images and “Suspect Data” in Many Leading Cancer Research Papers

Charles Piller in his Doctored paints a damning picture of doctored images and suspect data rampant in the leading scientific literature on Alzheimer’s disease. Not only were leading scientists guilty of fraud, but the key institutions of scientific research (journals, universities, and government grant-making agencies) failing their oversight duty, and when outsiders stepped in to provide oversight, delayed and minimized their responses. Practicing and turning a blind eye to fraud matters, since Alzheimer’s patients are depending on this research. And researchers who do not commit fraud suffer because they appear to have worse research records than those compiled by the fraudsters. So the honest get worse academic appointments and fewer grants.

After reading Doctored I was depressed, but I at least hoped that this pathology was limited to this one (albeit an important one) area of medical research. But in the article quoted below, evidence is presented that there is substantial similar doctored images and suspect data in the field of cancer research.

A side issue in the quoted article is worth highlighting. In the absence of credible oversight from the institutions tasked with oversight, oversight is being done by competent volunteers, with the aid of A.I. These volunteers do not receive compensation for their work, and in fact are probably pay a price for it, since they alienate powerful scientists and scientific institutions. But if science is a search for truth, and truth matters for cures, they are doing a service to us all, and especially to those who suffer from major diseases such as Alsheimer’s and cancer.

On the connection with the Doctored book, it is worth noting that the article quotes Dr. Matthew Schrag, who is the most important source in Doctored. The article also quoted Elisabeth Bik, who does not have an MD like Schrag but has a PhD in microbiology, and who is another important source in Doctored.

(p. A1) The stomach cancer study was shot through with suspicious data. Identical constellations of cells were said to depict separate experiments on wholly different biological lineages. Photos of tumor-stricken mice, used to show that a drug reduced cancer growth, had been featured in two previous papers describing other treatments.

Problems with the study were severe enough that its publisher, after finding that the paper violated ethics guidelines, formally withdrew it within a few months of its publication in 2021. The study was then wiped from the internet, leaving behind a barren web page that said nothing about the reasons for its removal.

As it turned out, the flawed study was part of a pattern. Since 2008, two of its authors — Dr. Sam S. Yoon, chief of a cancer surgery division at Columbia University’s medical center, and a more junior cancer biologist — have collaborated with a rotating cast of researchers on a combined 26 articles that a British scientific sleuth has publicly flagged for containing suspect data. A medical journal retracted one of them this month after inquiries from The New York Times.

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where Dr. Yoon worked when much of the research was done, is now investigating the studies. Columbia’s medical center declined to comment on specific allegations, saying only that it reviews “any concerns about scientific integrity brought to our attention.”

Dr. Yoon, who has said his research could lead to better cancer treatments, did not answer repeated questions. Attempts to speak to the other researcher, Changhwan Yoon, an associate research scientist at Columbia, were also unsuccessful.

The allegations were aired in recent months in online comments on a science forum and in a blog post by Sholto David, an independent molecular biologist. He has ferreted out problems in a raft of high-profile cancer research, including dozens of papers at a Harvard cancer center that were subsequently referred for retractions or corrections.

From his flat in Wales, Dr. David pores over published images of cells, tumors and mice in his spare (p. A17) time and then reports slip-ups, trying to close the gap between people’s regard for academic research and the sometimes shoddier realities of the profession.

. . .

Armed with A.I.-powered detection tools, scientists and bloggers have recently exposed a growing body of such questionable research, like the faulty papers at Harvard’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and studies by Stanford’s president that led to his resignation last year.

But those high-profile cases were merely the tip of the iceberg, experts said. A deeper pool of unreliable research has gone unaddressed for years, shielded in part by powerful scientific publishers driven to put out huge volumes of studies while avoiding the reputational damage of retracting them publicly.

The quiet removal of the 2021 stomach cancer study from Dr. Yoon’s lab, a copy of which was reviewed by The Times, illustrates how that system of scientific publishing has helped enable faulty research, experts said. In some cases, critical medical fields have remained seeded with erroneous studies.

“The journals do the bare minimum,” said Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and image expert who described Dr. Yoon’s papers as showing a worrisome pattern of copied or doctored data. “There’s no oversight.”

. . .

Dr. Yoon, a stomach cancer specialist and a proponent of robotic surgery, kept climbing the academic ranks, bringing his junior researcher along with him. In September 2021, around the time the study was published, he joined Columbia, which celebrated his prolific research output in a news release. His work was financed in part by half a million dollars in federal research money that year, adding to a career haul of nearly $5 million in federal funds.

. . .

The researchers’ suspicious publications stretch back 16 years. Over time, relatively minor image copies in papers by Dr. Yoon gave way to more serious discrepancies in studies he collaborated on with Changhwan Yoon, Dr. David said. The pair, who are not related, began publishing articles together around 2013.

But neither their employers nor their publishers seemed to start investigating their work until this past fall, when Dr. David published his initial findings on For Better Science, a blog, and notified Memorial Sloan Kettering, Columbia and the journals. Memorial Sloan Kettering said it began its investigation then.

. . .

A proliferation of medical journals, they said, has helped fuel demand for ever more research articles. But those same journals, many of them operated by multibillion-dollar publishing companies, often respond slowly or do nothing at all once one of those articles is shown to contain copied data. Journals retract papers at a fraction of the rate at which they publish ones with problems.

. . .

“There are examples in this set that raise pretty serious red flags for the possibility of misconduct,” said Dr. Matthew Schrag, a Vanderbilt University neurologist who commented as part of his outside work on research integrity.

. . .

Experts said the handling of the article was symptomatic of a tendency on the part of scientific publishers to obscure reports of lapses.

“This is typical, sweeping-things-under-the-rug kind of nonsense,” said Dr. Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch, which keeps a database of 47,000-plus retracted papers. “This is not good for the scientific record, to put it mildly.”

For the full story, see:

Benjamin Mueller. “Cancer Doctor Is in Spotlight Over Bad Data.” The New York Times. (Fri., February 16, 2024): A1 & A17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version has the date Feb. 15, 2024 [sic], and has the title “A Columbia Surgeon’s Study Was Pulled. He Kept Publishing Flawed Data.”)

Piller’s book mentioned in my initial comments is:

Piller, Charles. Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s. New York: Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2025.

Health Freedom Is a Right AND Can Yield More and Faster Therapies

The headline of the article on the front page of the NYT says “No Evidence for Healing Powers,” and goes on to slam unsophisticated right-wingers as irresponsibly pushing ivermectin as a therapy for cancer. In the article the NYT publishes a ludicrous picture from a right-winger’s Facebook page where he has spread veterinary ivermectin cream on his tongue and says “tastes like dead cancer.”

But this is unfair and tendentious caricature. A friend recently sent me an Instagram post by a chiropractor suffering from glioblastoma who has taken ivermectin and mebendazole. He briefly sketches the hypothesized mechanisms for activity of the two drugs, consistent with research published in scientific papers.

Glioblastoma is a serious, often fatal, brain cancer. He had surgery, but knows that surgery often does not cure, so he threw a Hail Mary and took ivermectin and mebendazole. These drugs have long track-records for safety, having been tested and approved for other uses. Doctors can, and have, prescribed drugs for off-label uses for decades.

Decades ago minoxidil was approved as an blood pressure medicine. I asked my then-doctor to prescribe it for me for its rumored effects as a hair loss cure. He did, so I crushed the tablets and somehow applied them to my scalp, which proceeded to itch, but not grow hair. It was a low-risk, modest-chance-of-success experiment. I think I had a right to try it, and that no government or expert had a right to forbid it. (Eventually minoxidil was approved for hair loss and branded Rogaine–which still didn’t work for me.)

In a free country adults should have wide latitude to make decisions about what risks they take; to scuba dive, to drive NASCAR, to go into space, and yes to take ivermectin and mebendazole. And the ludicrous right-winger? Hey, maybe even he has rights.

The NYT headline says there is “no evidence” for ivermectin. Below I cite a survey article that identifies 24 articles published in scientific journals identifying mechanisms by which ivermectin may be effective against cancer. There’s plenty of evidence, just not from randomized double-blind clinical trials (RCTs). But as long-time readers of this blog may remember, I have posted many entries giving useful actionable evidence that takes forms other than RCTs.

“No evidence”? Maybe the NYT was seeking plausible deniability by running its article on April 1st.

Oh, and by the way, allowing health freedom might sometimes result in better and faster therapies. I am currently reading Rethinking Diabetes by Gary Taubes. He tells the story (pp. 346-356) of Richard K. Bernstein, an engineer with Type 1 diabetes who was suffering from various serious ailments from his diabetes, in spite of the doctors saying it was being well-controlled by insulin. In his 40s, he was only expected to live another 10 years. Well he bought a new device that was not supposed to be bought by patients. The medical profession thought patients could not handle the information. (His wife was an MD, so he ‘bought’ it by asking her to buy it for him.) The device allowed him to get frequent readings of his blood sugar, and thereby to better control it, ultimately through changes in diet. When he tried to share what he had learned, he had trouble finding anyone who would take him seriously, so in his 40s he enrolled in medical school, and started publishing papers and books describing his results.

Richard K. Bernstein died on April 15, 2025 at age 90.

[Below are some relevant quotations from a NYT companion piece to the front-page article. The companion piece provides only slightly less tendentious background information on ivermectin.]

(p. A21) . . . there is not evidence to support people taking ivermectin to treat cancer.

. . .

Scientists do not dispute that ivermectin is powerfully effective — against parasites. The drug was such a breakthrough in the fight against tropical parasitic diseases that two scientists who studied it won the Nobel Prize in 2015.

The Food and Drug Administration has approved ivermectin tablets to treat certain parasitic infections, and the agency has authorized ivermectin lotions to kill lice and creams to help with rosacea. Veterinarians also use the drug to prevent and treat parasitic diseases in animals.

. . .

Studies in human cells suggest that the drug may kill certain types of cancer cells in a way that triggers the immune system, said Dr. Peter P. Lee, chair of the department of immuno-oncology at Beckman Research Institute of City of Hope in Duarte, Calif. In mouse studies, Dr. Lee has seen that the drug, on its own, does not shrink breast tumors. But it’s possible that the drug may have benefits for breast cancer when used alongside existing cancer immunotherapy, he said. Researchers are studying a combination of ivermectin and an investigational cancer drug in people with breast cancer.

While some inaccurate social media posts claim that ivermectin can treat cancer because tumors themselves are parasitic, the promise of ivermectin for cancer has nothing to do with its anti-parasitic effect, Dr. Lee said. Rather, it seems that the drug may be able to modulate a signal involved with cancer growth.

But doctors still need larger, randomized clinical trials to better understand whether ivermectin could treat cancer. Just because a drug seems to work in animals doesn’t mean those results will translate into real-world outcomes, Dr. Johnson noted. There are “hundreds of medications that look to be promising in a preclinical setting” every year, he said, adding, “The vast majority of those will never be shown to be effective in humans.”

. . .

Doctors generally view ivermectin as safe at the doses prescribed to treat parasitic infections.

For the full story, see:

Dani Blum. “What Ivermectin Can and Can’t Do, and What the Dangers Are.” The New York Times (Tues., April 1, 2025): A21.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version has the date March 31, 2025, and has the title “What Ivermectin Can (and Can’t) Do.” In the first quoted sentence, the print version says “no evidence” and the online version says “not evidence.”)

The Blum article that I just quoted and cited, is a secondary companion article to a longer front-page article, also on ivermectin:

Richard Fausset. “No Evidence for Healing Powers, but ‘Tastes Like Dead Cancer’.” The New York Times (Tues., April 1, 2025): A1 & A21.

(Note: the online version has the date March 31, 2025, and has the title “Why the Right Still Embraces Ivermectin.”)

The paper cited below reviewed the published scientific literature as of 2020 on the mechanisms through which ivermectin could have anti-cancer effects, finding 24 articles documenting one or more mechanisms.

Tang, Mingyang, Xiaodong Hu, Yi Wang, Xin Yao, Wei Zhang, Chenying Yu, Fuying Cheng, Jiangyan Li, and Qiang Fang. “Ivermectin, a Potential Anticancer Drug Derived from an Antiparasitic Drug.” Pharmacological Research 163 (Jan. 2021): 105207.

Tang and co-authors are optimistic in their summary section quoted below. [In this quote IVM is “ivermectin” and MDR is “multidrug resistance”.]

. . ., the broad-spectrum antiparasitic drug IVM, which is widely used in the field of parasitic control, has many advantages that suggest that it is worth developing as a potential new anticancer drug. IVM selectively inhibits the proliferation of tumors at a dose that is not toxic to normal cells and can reverse the MDR of tumors. Importantly, IVM is an established drug used for the treatment of parasitic diseases such as river blindness and elephantiasis. It has been widely used in humans for many years, and its various pharmacological properties, including long- and short-term toxicological effects and drug metabolism characteristics are very clear. (Tang et al. Jan. 2021, pp. 7-8)

The paper cited below reviewed the published scientific literature as of 2019 on the effect of mebendazole on cancer, and found 26 in vitro studies showing anti-cancer biological effects, 14 in vivo studies showing anti-tumor effects, and six Phase 1 or Phase 2 clinical trials listed in ClinicalTrials.gov.

Guerini, Andrea Emanuele, Luca Triggiani, Marta Maddalo, Marco Lorenzo Bonù, Francesco Frassine, Anna Baiguini, Alessandro Alghisi, Davide Tomasini, Paolo Borghetti, Nadia Pasinetti, Roberto Bresciani, Stefano Maria Magrini, and Michela Buglione. “Mebendazole as a Candidate for Drug Repurposing in Oncology: An Extensive Review of Current Literature.” Cancers 11, no. 9 (Aug. 2019): article #1284.

Gary Taubes’s book, praised by Marty Makary and Siddhartha Mukherjee, and mentioned by me near the end of my commentary, is:

Taubes, Gary. Rethinking Diabetes: What Science Reveals About Diet, Insulin, and Successful Treatments. New York: Knopf, 2024.

[I thank Ivette Locay for sending me a link useful for my commentary.]

Mainstream Approach to Alzheimer’s Is Built on Doctored Data

Widespread fraud among highly credentialled, and richly financed, medical researchers results in fewer and slower cures. Many millions of dollars are required to bring a major drug to market, much of it due to the hyper-costly and mandated Phase 3 randomized double-blind clinical trials. There are more good ideas than can receive such financing. The intense competition creates a temptation to cut various corners, as the book review quoted below emphasizes.

Aaron Rothstein, the reviewer of Piller’s Doctored book, emphasizes the sad revelation of widespread fraud. But in an earlier entry on this blog, I quoted an essay of Piller’s that suggests that Piller also has something substantive to say about how to cure Alzheimer’s. The current system is broken, vastly reducing the diversity of approaches to curing important diseases like Alzheimer’s. Piller suggests that the ruling clique among Alzheimer’s researchers may in effect be silencing other approaches that could bring us a better faster cure.

Rothstein downplays this substantive aspect of Piller’s book. (It probably reflects too much cynicism on my part to wonder how close Rothstein himself is to the ruling clique?)

I look forward to reading Piller’s book, both for what it has to say about widespread fraud and for what it has to say about Alzheimer’s. Doctored is scheduled for release in a few days, on February 4, 2025.

(p. C9) In 2023 my colleagues and I were preparing to enroll patients in a clinical trial of a new drug that promised to mitigate brain damage in stroke victims. The National Institutes of Health, a governmental organization that funds billions of dollars of research every year, had committed $30 million to the trial. The drug was, in part, the brainchild of Berislav Zlokovic, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California.

Then, suddenly, the NIH paused the trial. Charles Piller, an investigative journalist for Science magazine, had published an article alleging that multiple papers from Dr. Zlokovic, including many supporting the new drug, contained seemingly altered data. Though Dr. Zlokovic disputed some of the concerns, this news stunned us. We might have put patients at risk, while offering groundless hope. A fraud of the sort Mr. Piller described would violate the basic ethics of clinical trials and overturn the presumption of trust on which the practice of medicine relies.

I thought of this episode often as I read Mr. Piller’s “Doctored,” which brings together his long-form journalism about neuroscience-research malfeasance, including that alleged of Dr. Zlokovic. Though the book sometimes attempts to do too much—diving into scientific theories about the causes of Alzheimer’s, for example—its strength lies in Mr. Piller’s dramatic and damning investigation of scientific transgression. The author’s reporting is largely based on the research of Matthew Schrag, a Vanderbilt neurologist who uses technical expertise to identify episodes of misconduct.

. . .

Mr. Piller thoroughly double checks Dr. Schrag’s work. He asks researchers and image analysts to confirm Dr. Schrag’s findings, and they concur.

. . .

“Doctored” demonstrates how some of the most accomplished and elite scientific gatekeepers may have lied, cheated, squandered trust and endangered lives. How did this happen? The temptations of ego and fame perennially entice humans, but our system of peer review, grant funding and administrative oversight is meant to check these temptations.

The scientific publication process does not contain all the safeguards one might expect. Peer reviewers do not always see the original data from authors. Thus they trust that numbers or images in a manuscript accurately reflect the experiment. And determining whether an image is fraudulent requires skilled image analysis that peer reviewers may not possess. Furthermore, digging for such mistakes is costly: It takes time away from other research, from teaching, from seeing patients and from home life.

What can be done about this? Making raw data available to peer reviewers and giving them time to review articles could help. Mr. Piller suggests a less professionally incestuous relationship between researchers, the Food and Drug Administration, the NIH and pharmaceutical companies could reduce favoritism in funding. A major overhaul of the finances and administrative swell of our system would help, as well.

For the full review see:

Aaron Rothstein. “Medical Promise Betrayed.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Jan. 25, 2025): C9.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date January 24, 2025, and has the title “‘Doctored’ Review: Medical Promise Betrayed.”)

The book under review is:

Piller, Charles. Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s. New York: Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2025.

The Dynamic Renewal of artdiamondblog.com

In my Openness to Creative Destruction book I claim that we flourish through dynamism. But sometimes I do not practice what I preach. I fear that may be true with artdiamondblog.com. So I have spent some time pondering changes in my blog that I hope will on balance make it more useful to readers, and also free some of my time for my current main project, a book on Less Costs, More Cures: Unbinding Medical Entrepreneurs.

The Benefits and Opportunity Cost of My Current Blog:

Sone entries preserve some important examples that otherwise might be hard to find or to document.

Some entries help inform readers (and publishers) about my articles and books.

But time spent editing entries could be spent on my next book, or on writing op-eds, or on researching academic papers.

Conclusion:

I believe that the time I spend on my blog has produced value. But I also believe that the time could produce greater value if I re-directed some of it to my main project, the book Less Costs, More Cures. I also believe that it will have more value if a higher percent of the blog entries are related to the new book. (As Aaron and any other regular readers of the blog know, over the past year or two I have already moved in the direction of a higher percent of blog entries being relevant to Less Costs, More Cures.)

I have spent time preserving and sorting articles that I will now toss. Painful, but I long taught that sunk costs really are sunk, and I should practice what I preached.

In addition to content renewal, I also plan to implement some process renewal. Some of this will be trial and error. The content and process ideas below are not an exhaustive list.

Blog Renewal:

For some entries, instead of the past substantial quotations, I will just provide a citation and a couple of sentence summary. This will take less of my time, and so will have less opportunity cost. For some of the entries this change may also make it clearer to the reader why I think the cited article is important.

For articles related to Less Costs, More Cures, I will sometimes continue the past “readers digest” format for entries, where I explicitly quote particularly apt or important portions of the article. But I will less frequently do so for articles that support contentious points that I made in Openness.

I plan to occasionally add entries that provide meaningful and/or entertaining anecdotes or vignettes from my life as an academic. I hope these will not take much time, and that some may be useful to future historians of thought.

For articles to blog, I will try harder to seek out those that will stand the test of time–not depreciate quickly. These would tend to be meaningful stories, not statistics, or short-term accounts about particular firms or executives.

I will stop blogging so much on issues that are important, but where a strong and growing minority are presenting similar information. Three such issues would be environmental optimism, anti-D.E.I., and anti-Chinese-Communist violation of rights. For example, on the environment, we may be approaching a tipping point. Even The New York Times, sometimes in front page articles, has been explaining the potential of geoengineering (though still with the obligatory politically correct nod to the anti-growth/anti-technology environmentalists). [See: Gelles, David. “Can We Engineer Our Way Out of a Climate Crisis?” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, March 31, 2024): 1 & 12-13; Gelles, David. “Scientist Wants to Block Sunlight to Cool Earth.” The New York Times (Sunday, Aug. 4, 2024): 1 & 18-19; Plumer, Brad, and Raymond Zhong. “Bold Plan Would Turn the World’s Oceans into Carbon Busters.” The New York Times (Monday, Sept. 23, 2024): A1 & A12-A13; and Gelles, David. “Renegades of Silicon Valley Pollute the Sky to Save the Planet.” The New York Times (Monday, Sept. 30, 2024): B1-B2.]

Welcome Your Comments:

Although I hope that my blog has been useful, and I have ideas about how it might have been useful, I rarely have empirical evidence. So I will be grateful if you let me know if any of it has been useful to you. I also will be grateful if you let me know what you think about my plans for renewal, and what suggestions you have for improvement (especially suggestions that do not cost me much time or effort ;).

You can respond within my blog as a comment to this entry or you can email me at amdiamond@cox.net. (Or if you have one of my other email addresses, use what you already have.)

artdiamondblog.com Is Partly a Shared Digital Commonplace Book

In describing the purpose of this blog, I have sometimes called it a digital shared commonplace book, focusing especially on the topics that I focus most of my research on: entrepreneurship and innovation.

(p. B5) Creating a commonplace book is somewhat like marking your favorite lines in a novel with the Amazon Kindle highlights feature — except your personal one-stop knowledge repository can also include song lyrics, movie dialogue, poems, recipes, podcast transcripts, and any inspiring bits you find in your reading and listening. The commonplace book is not a new concept: Copying down your favorite lines from other people’s works into your own annotated notebook was a standard exercise in Renaissance Europe, and the idea can be traced to the Roman era.

. . .

If you’ve never made a commonplace book before, first learn how others have used them. Academic libraries, along with museums, are home to many commonplace books, and you can see them without leaving the couch. John Milton’s commonplace book is on the British Library site, and the personal notebooks of other writers and thinkers pop up easily with a web search.

The Yale University Library has scanned pages of historical commonplace books in its holdings, and the Harvard Library has a few in its own online collection, as well as images of a version of John Locke’s 17th-century guide to making commonplace books, which was originally published in French. And the Internet Archive has hundreds of digitized commonplace books for browsing or borrowing, including one from Sir Alec Guinness.

For the full commentary see:

J. D. Biersdorfer. “PERSONAL TECH; A Line Moves You? Put Down the Highlighter.” The New York Times (Thursday, February 11, 2021): B5.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Feb. 10, 2021, and has the title “PERSONAL TECH; Create a Digital Commonplace Book.”)

Solve Future Crises by Allowing the Nimble to Innovate

Donald Boudreaux, on his Café Hayek blog, quotes a passage from my Openness book, saying that the best way to prepare for unknown future crises is to sustain a society where nimble innovators are allowed to nimbly innovate. Donald posted the quote on Mon., Dec. 6, 2021.

My book is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Cafe Hayek Quotes from Openness Book on Happiness

Posted by Arthur Diamond on Friday, April 2, 2021

Don Boudreaux quotes from my Openness to Creative Destruction book on Cafe Hayek, the blog he runs with Russ Roberts.

My book is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Infectious Disease Specialist Asks If Chinese Labs Did “Gain of Function” Research on Covid-19

(p. D7) For decades, Dr. Daniel R. Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University, has crisscrossed the globe to study epidemics and their origins. His attention now is on the Covid-19 pandemic, which first came to public notice late last year in Wuhan, China. Its exact beginnings are sufficiently clouded that the World Health Organization has begun a wide inquiry into its roots. The advance team is to leave for China this weekend, and Dr. Lucey has publicly encouraged the health agency to address what he considers eight top questions.

“It’s not a legitimate investigation if the team doesn’t ask them,” Dr. Lucey said in a recent interview. He cited public reports and scientific articles as starting points for his queries, adding that Beijing “has never come out and answered these questions.”

Clear answers, Dr. Lucey said, would cast light on how the deadly pathogen spread so rapidly and, perhaps, how exactly the outbreak began. China has not been forthcoming with information, . . .

. . .

The sixth and seventh questions go to whether the deadly pathogen leapt to humans from a laboratory. Although some intelligence analysts and scientists have entertained that scenario, no direct evidence has come to light suggesting that the coronavirus escaped from one of Wuhan’s labs.

Even so, given the wet market’s downgrading in the investigation, “It is important to address questions about any potential laboratory source of the virus, whether in Wuhan or elsewhere,” Dr. Lucey wrote in his blog post.

To that end, he urges the W.H.O. investigators to look for any signs of “gain of function” research — the deliberate enhancement of pathogens to make them more dangerous. The technique is highly contentious. Critics question its merits and warn that it could lead to catastrophic lab leaks. Proponents see it as a legitimate way to learn how viruses and other infectious organisms might evolve to infect and kill people, and thus help in devising new protections and precautions.

Debate over its wisdom erupted in 2011 after researchers announced success in making the highly lethal H5N1 strain of avian flu easily transmissible through the air between ferrets, at least in the laboratory.

In his blog, Dr. Lucey asks “what, if any,” gain-of-function studies were done on coronaviruses in Wuhan, elsewhere in China, or in collaboration with foreign laboratories.

“If done well scientifically, then this investigation should allay persistent concerns about the origin of this virus,” he wrote. “It could also help set an improved standard for investigating and stopping the awful viruses, and other pathogens, in the decades ahead.”

Finally, Dr. Lucey asks the W.H.O. team to learn more about China’s main influenza research lab, a high-security facility in Harbin, the capital of China’s northernmost province. In May [2020], he notes, a Chinese paper in the journal Science reported that two virus samples from Wuhan were studied there in great detail early this year, including in a variety of animals. It reported that cats and ferrets were highly susceptible to the pathogen; dogs were only mildly susceptible; and pigs, chickens and ducks were not susceptible at all.

For the full story, see:

William J. Broad. “Disease Detective Puts Forth Pointed Questions.” The New York Times (Tuesday, July 14, 2020): D7.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 8, 2020, and has the title “8 Questions From a Disease Detective on the Pandemic’s Origins.”)

The blog posting in which Dr. Lucey asked his eight key questions, is:

Lucey, Daniel R. “Covid-19: Covid: Eight Questions for the Who Team Going to China Next Week to Investigate Pandemic Origins.” Science Speaks: Global ID News blog, posted June 30, 2020.