Potti was a researcher. His misconduct was faking research. Faking research is something you do in private, with no witnesses other than those helping you fake the research.

When fake research gets published, it is generally not immediately evident something is wrong. Eventually someone might notice that the purported experimental data is too ideal to be from a real experiment, or other researchers will fail to replicate the results.

The Texas doctor, on the other hand, was a practicing neurosurgeon. Other surgeons were actually witnessing his surgeries and directly observing his incompetence. He was leaving behind a trail of dead and crippled patients at an alarming rate.

I don't see how the two are even remotely comparable.

Anil potti's research was clinical research. There were patients who went through the WRONG chemotherapy based on his "computer treatment prediction algorithm". In other words, there were patients who were effectively chemically tortured to death under the color of medical authority, based on faked data.

Potti's claim was that he could predict which chemotherapy drugs would be most effective on a particular patient. The test patients were still getting good anti-cancer drugs. He wasn't giving them random drugs that had nothing to do with fighting cancer.

The most likely effect of the fake data on the test patients would be that their treatment was merely as effective as that of patients in the control group. It is very unlikely his methods produced worse outcomes--if they did, he would not have needed to fake anything! He could have published his methods as a way to identify drugs that would be ineffective for a particular patient, which would be about as big a breakthrough as what he was claiming.

do you know anything about chemotherapy? Taking these drugs is not just popping a pill and waking home like nothing happened.

In the trials, the control group and the trial group were being treated with the same sets of drugs. In the control group in one of the trials, for instance, patients were assigned to one of two sets of drugs randomly. In the test group, they were assigned to one of those same two sets of drugs using Potti's research.

Note that people in the test group received one of the treatments they could have received had they been in the control group. Since Potti's research was fake, there was effectively no difference between the test group and the control group.

no they wouldn't have. You don't go into cancer drug trials by taking just anyone who waltzes into the oncology ward.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say here. Yes, they don't just take random people. The breast cancer study, for example, wanted 18+ year old females, with a T1c to T3 invasive breast cancer, at any N stage, with no distant metastases, with a tumor size >1.5 cm in at least one dimension. They had to be a surgical candidate, with no chemotherapy, radiotherapy, or biologic/targeted therapy for that tumor or any other malignancy in the past 5 years. They had to have an ECOG status of 0-1, and adequate scores on several measures of organ function, and no significant heart problems or blood pressure problems.

The patients were randomly assigned to the control group or to the test group. Those in the control group were either treated with Doxorubicin/Cyclophosphamide or Docetaxel/Cyclophosphamide, randomly assigned.

Those in the test group were either treated with Doxorubicin/Cyclophosphamide or Docetaxel/Cyclophosphamide, assigned by the genomic data Potti claimed would predict which would work better for that patient.

You are right, that is a rather weak claim in an otherwise very well written article. I especially don't see how higher pain-and-suffering damages would have helped stopping this criminal sooner.

maybe, maybe, by adding a marginal deterrent for him to become a doctor. Maybe by increasing his malpractice insurance costs (but there would have been no data for him, so it wouldn't have helped, and it would increase malpractice costs for competent brilliant newbie docs)

The pain and suffering damage limit appears to be just one factor of several that worked together in Texas to make it easier for him to get away with his incompetent surgeries.

The other factors make it much harder to prove a malpractice case in Texas than in other states, and then the low limit on the damages (which, as the article notes will leave very little for the patient after costs) makes it not worthwhile to pursue the case.

If he could have been successfully sued then after his first two or three botched surgeries his insurance rates would probably be through the roof, and the lawsuits would be public making it easier for the public to learn that they should never go to this guy for treatment.

The real question is: why was he able to get a medical license in the first place? Why was he able to get good enough grades to get through medical school? Why was a man this incompetent so impossible to spot much earlier?

Our institutions are in shambles, at every level.

The article implies that the Medical Board believed he may have been impaired because of the use of drugs or alcohol. So he could have appeared reasonably competent before he developed those problems.

Yeah, the same board that let him keep practicing. I'll need evidence to believe that the "Doctor" wasn't incompetent the whole way through. Is it possible that something went wrong with his brain? Might he have a tumor or something that's yet to be discovered? Sure. But that's speculation. What's real is the incompetence that's running amok in our institutions. That's the nearest explanation rooted in actual evidence, so I'll go with that one.