Hell Hath No Fury Like A Scorned Psychiatrist by Jack Swint
“After an extensive and thorough review, the inquiry committee concluded that there was no plagiarism and no merit to the allegations of research misconduct. Drs. Evans and Gyulai satisfied all authorship criteria and the publication presented the research findings accurately.”… University Of Pennsylvania Officials 3/2/2012.
In July of 2010, Psychiatrist Jay Amsterdam alleged in a letter to the federal Office of Research Integrity that 5 researchers, including Penn's Laszlo Gyulai and Dwight Evans, chair of the Penn psychiatry department, had engaged in scientific misconduct back in 2001 by allowing their names to be appended to a manuscript that was drafted by Scientific Therapeutics Information.
What could make this psychiatrist expose his former colleagues? Maybe, leaving his name off the study which also kept him from receiving payments from the drug companies has something to do with it? Beginning back in 2001, he sent out numerous sharply worded e-mails to his colleagues repeatedly complaining about being omitted from the list of authors of the article that appeared in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Amsterdam claims that he personally contributed to the study, but was not named as a co-author. He has been on leave from the Penn Medical Facility since May 2010.
One of the others he accused is Psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff, who in 2008, failed to report income he made from a drug company while teaching at Emory University. He is now chair of psychiatry at the University of Miami. Nemeroff was the focus of a 2007 Senate Finance Committee investigation headed up by Senator Chuck Grassley (R) looking into millions of dollars paid by drug companies to Nemeroff and psychiatrists at the University of Cincinnati and Stanford.
On March 2, 2012 officials from Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, released their findings. “After an extensive and thorough review, the inquiry committee concluded that there was no plagiarism and no merit to the allegations of research misconduct. Drs. Evans and Gyulai satisfied all authorship criteria and the publication presented the research findings accurately.”
They go on to state, “With respect to the allegations of ghostwriting, the committee also addressed whether the medical writers engaged by the study sponsor should have been acknowledged in the publication. While current Perelman School of Medicine policy and journal practice call for acknowledgment of the assistance of a medical writer, the committee concluded that guidelines in place in 2001 did not.”
In addition, “the manuscript submitted to the journal included the institutional affiliation of the authors, but the journal removed that information from the publication. Further, it is important to note that the results of the study were negative to the sponsor’s product, were so characterized in the publication, and the negative findings have been consistently cited as such in the literature.”
Finally, the committee found that Dr. Amsterdam's contributions to patient recruitment and data collection did not meet with the journal's guidelines for authorship, despite Dr. Amsterdam's earlier claim that he should have been considered an author of the publication. However, along with many other investigators, the paper acknowledged him as one of the investigators in the study.”
It’s not known if Dr. Amsterdam will continue to pursue any options he may have to further this case.
End Of Story,
Jack Swint-Publisher
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