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Re:Anatomy of a Tragedy by tzs on Saturday August 31, 2013 @12:59PM (#6307301)
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.

Re:Anatomy of a Tragedy by dnautics on Saturday August 31, 2013 @03:51PM (#6307860)
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.
Re:Anatomy of a Tragedy by tzs on Saturday August 31, 2013 @04:24PM (#6307961)
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.

Re:Anatomy of a Tragedy by dnautics on Saturday August 31, 2013 @07:15PM (#6308484)
do you know anything about chemotherapy? Taking these drugs is not just popping a pill and waking home like nothing happened.
Re:Anatomy of a Tragedy by tzs on Saturday August 31, 2013 @08:20PM (#6308606)
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.

Re:Anatomy of a Tragedy by dnautics on Saturday August 31, 2013 @09:36PM (#6308758)
no they wouldn't have. You don't go into cancer drug trials by taking just anyone who waltzes into the oncology ward.
Re:Anatomy of a Tragedy by tzs on Sunday September 01, 2013 @01:32AM (#6309260)
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.