The investigation concluded that Fujii’s co-authors, with at least one exception, were unaware of his misconduct. Indeed, it appears he fabricated their signatures in many, if not most instances.There is absolutely an ethical responsibility on the part of his 'co-authors' to step up and say, "Hey, I didn't contribute to this paper, I didn't review it, I don't stand by it, don't put my name on it." I know why they didn't (because names-on-papers is a good thing, and if someone offers you a co-author for no work, it's tempting).
Problem With the Specialty or Statistical Cluster?This passage from Blasdelb's last link is interesting to me in light of the fact that a number of anesthetics are NMDA receptor antagonists:
The Fujii scandal marks the biggest and most recent, but hardly the first, major misconduct probe involving anesthesiologists. In 2009, Scott Reuben, then of Baystate Medical Center in Massachusetts, was found to have fabricated data and misused grant money—fraud for which he spent six months in federal prison. That was followed by news that Joachim Boldt, a leading German critical care specialist, had failed to obtain ethics approval in scores of studies, nearly 90 of which have been retracted. Boldt also appears to have fabricated findings in at least one paper, which A&A retracted in 2010.
In fact, of the 2,200 papers that journals have retracted since 1970, Reuben, Boldt and Fujii—assuming the 172 articles found to be fraudulent are pulled—account for roughly 285, or nearly 13%.
Anesthesiologists “have an absolutely horrifying track record in terms of retractions,” said R. Grant Steen, a researcher who studies publishing ethics.
I really wonder whether anesthesiologists aren’t feeling like the ground is shifting underneath them.
NMDA receptor antagonists are a class of anesthetics that work to antagonize, or inhibit the action of, the N-methyl d-aspartate receptor (NMDAR). They are used as anesthesia for animals and, less commonly, for humans; the state of anesthesia they induce is referred to as dissociative anesthesia. There is evidence that NMDA receptor antagonists can cause a certain type of neurotoxicity or brain damage referred to as Olney's Lesions in rodents, though such damage has never been observed in primates like humans.In addition to the anesthetics mentioned by the Wikipedia article, the very widely used halothane and its analogues also display NMDA receptor antagonist activity.
Several synthetic opioids function additionally as NMDAR-antagonists, such as Meperidine, Methadone, Dextropropoxyphene, Tramadol and Ketobemidone.
Some NMDA receptor antagonists, including but not limited to ketamine (K), dextromethorphan (DXM), phencyclidine (PCP), and nitrous oxide (N2O) are popular as recreational drugs for their dissociative, hallucinogenic, and/or euphoriant properties. When used recreationally, they are classified as dissociative drugs.
Even if the hypothesis of gross neural apoptosis proves to be false in humans, NMDA antagonists certainly have potential to permanently alter synaptic structure due to effects upon long term potentiation, which NMDA plays a crucial role in. Perhaps, with repeated usage, this would manifest, due to tolerance, thus downregulation, of the NMDA receptor system. This could feasibly alter the function/relationship of various structures, specifically the ventral visual stream, which is a likely cause of the anecdotal reports of hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD) from such chronic users.If Fujii's ordeal were to be a criminal trial rather than the death of a thousand paper cuts which he is now enduring, and I was his defense attorney, my entire defense would be that my client had committed these crimes as a direct result of long term occupational exposure to these potent brain-altering vapors-- the anesthesiological isomorphism of the Twinkie Defense, in other words.
Olney's Lesions have not yet been proven or disproven to manifest in humans. No tests have been conducted to test the validity of post-dissociative development of vacuolization in human brain tissue, and critics claim that animal testing is not a reliable predictor of the effects of dissociative substances on humans:
The evidence is that ketamine and many other NMDA-receptor antagonists that have been tested in humans, cause an acute disturbance in neural circuitry that leads to psychotic manifestations. These same drugs cause the same disturbance in neural circuitry in rats and when we look at their brains we see evidence for physical neuronal injury. Since no one has looked at the brains of humans immediately after administering these drugs, we do not know whether the physical neuronal injury occurs.[8]
—John Olney, Private correspondence
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posted by Gyan at 5:36 AM on July 8, 2012