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Re: Internet



On Fri, 20 Jul 2001, Dean DeBolt wrote:

> There was a mention earlier on the list about a medical
> research death due to the research having been done via
> internet and not published sources.
>
> There's a feature in the news today about the shutting down of federal
> research funds for John Hopkins University due to the death of a
> human subject in one of the medical testing programs.

It's Johns Hopkins University, please.  Our founder was named for his
great-grandmother, Margaret Johns.  No big deal (and I'm not upset
because it happens all the time), but we're a little picky about that
point, since so many folks try to correct our "misspelling" for us
when we write to them.

> If one reads carefully the report of the investigation (on the
> Baltimore Sun website), you learn that before administering
> or using the particular drug, they did a search for information
> using Yahoo and Google, and PubMed.   Based on those
> results, they went ahead ... they did not do a true literature
> search which would have shown up the 1953 through 1960s
> published articles denoting the problems associated with
> using the drug.

Not quite accurate.  Here's a direct quote of the relevant text of the
July 17 Baltimore Sun story on this aspect:

"Togias [the principal investigator] had searched an electronic
medical database, called PubMed, which lists articles back to about
1960. And he had consulted contemporary edition medical textbooks, but
none of them mentioned the 1950s-era reports on hexamethonium's
toxicity, according to Hopkins officials.

"The Hopkins committee acknowledged, however, that a routine search
using two popular Internet search engines, Yahoo and Google, would
have produced a French medical school's Web site that listed the past
studies."

I'm not directly involved because I work with the non-medical
divisions of Hopkins, so I'm not trying to put any spin on the issue,
or make it appear less serious.  I just want to try and keep the facts
straight (at least as they're reported).  Lord knows the newspapers do
enough misquoting themselves without us misquoting the newspapers :-)

> However it was a frightening (to me) example of the
> mythology of the Internet since I have to deal with people
> everyday now who will say "there wasn't anything on the
> Internet" or "I couldn't find my high school yearbook on the
> internet."

This is a good example of an extreme case where the researcher should
have known better, and the extreme consequences that arose because of
his lack of forethought.  Most assumptions of this nature don't
involve human lives.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

James Stimpert                       ** PLEASE USE THE FOLLOWING:
Archives (Arts and Sciences)         E-mail:    stimpert@jhu.edu
MSE Library
Johns Hopkins University             Voice:     (410) 516-8323
3400 North Charles Street
Baltimore, MD  21218                 Fax:       (410) 516-7202

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