Health & safety
At the centre of Brooks' letter is a study of company data released as part of litigation made by Richard Clapp and Rebecca Johnson of Boston University (Bulletin 540, July 7, 2004). Brooks points out that Clapp was barred by four court orders from using the data for any purpose other than the litigation. "Any attempt to publish that data constitutes unlawful misappropriation, punishable by contempt of court," says Brooks.
Brooks further criticises Clapp's study in that it was "done in connection with litigation and was paid for by plaintiffs' counsel". He refers to a recent case in the UK where the Lancet medical journal retracted a study on a supposed relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism where a co-author was connected to litigation on the subject.
The letter also highlights IBM's funding of a "comprehensive mortality and cancer incidence study at three sites" being carried out by researchers from the University of Alabama and Harvard University. This is scheduled to be complete this year. Brooks believes that this will provide a far more reliable measure than Clapp's study. Brooks says that the data in the UAB/Harvard study are not that used by Clapp, which are "incomplete and inadequate for reliable study".
The "guest editor" of the magazine to which Clapp submitted his study also comes in for criticism. Dr Joe LaDou was to edit the November 2004 issue of Clinics in Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Brooks points out that LaDou was also one of the plaintiffs' experts in the litigation against IBM.
The letter concludes: "It is disturbing that a reputable journal like Science would allow itself to be used as a mouthpiece for litigation advocates whose position seems to be that "academic freedom" trumps court orders and justifies misappropriation of data, and that litigation-generated studies of woefully inadequate and incomplete data are a valuable contribution to scientific knowledge. Your readers deserved better."
Dan Ferber, the author of the original Science article, points out in a response that Clapp's attorney, Indira Talwani, maintains that the study is in the public domain and hence would not violate the court orders. He also adds that while a judge may have ruled the study irrelevant to a particular lawsuit, it "does not necessarily reflect on the quality of the underlying science". (Judge Robert Baines of the California Superior Court refused to admit the findings from the IBM data, calling them irrelevant and prejudicial because they didn't establish a link between the mortality data and workplace conditions.) According to Ferber, three epidemiologists unconnected with the lawsuit have looked at the study and agreed that its "conclusions, while preliminary, were scientifically valid and deserving of further study".
Science's editor-in-chief, Donald Kennedy, also weighs in: "The decision to disallow the testimony and to shield the work behind a gag order may have served the cause of justice, but the scientific community and public have been prevented from reaching their own conclusions about an important matter. Indeed, in view of IBM's scornful view of the study's quality, one wonders why they tried so hard to keep it out of sight."
