This is from KGO Channel 7 News in San Francisco on September 8, 2003.

ABC News On Using Naturally Occurring Vaginal Bacteria To Protect Women From HIV Transmission (Small – 6 MB)

Update 2:38pm — it has been brought to my attention that Ricaurte’s screw up was a “mistake,” rather than an intentional, precalculated deception. As you may well know by now, intent matters to me, so incompetence is sort of a defense in this case, I suppose, but it still sounds pretty shaky at best.

Here’s a great synopsis about it by Derek Lowe. (Note that Derek also agrees with me — that the original results should not have been published at all without first being repeated!)
It’s still irresponsible to publish information that could have such a profound impact on the population without qualifying it first at least twice in one’s own lab. Sloppy research at best. But the stuff I say below was said when I thought there was a deliberate misconception going on. Here’s the original retraction article. Nuff said. There’s more important stuff going on.
So the bozo that scared the world into thinking that one Ecstasy trip could scar your brain for life has admitted that he lied about his test results. (He has officially “retracted” them — and admitted to using other substances on the subjects involved than the substances that were supposed to be the focus of the study. That’s lying!)
Yeah I’ll say it’s “a major flaw in his research” that the research was absent of the the drug he’s supposedly testing.
This guy shouldn’t even be allowed to do research anymore. We don’t need big fat liars like you in Academia buddy. Away with you!
Leave your beaker at the door!

Here’s ABC World News on the subject.
Here’s the report containing some of the lies.
I hope it goes without saying that anything else this guy’s done should be considered suspect as well.
Here’s a clip from the summary I quote above:

But all that said, I have to then turn around and wonder why the original paper was published at all. I was surprised to learn that their results hadn’t been repeated beforehand. You’d think that this would be necessary, given the public health implications of the work and its variance with the results of others in the field. I can’t help but think that the researchers got their original data, thought they had a hot result that would make everyone sit up straight, and got it into publication as fast as they could.
I’m really taken aback to learn that they hadn’t looked at the original monkeys for MDMA levels before. Getting blood samples from monkeys is no easy task, but why wait until there’s a problem to do the post-mortem brain levels? Those numbers really would have helped to shore up the original results – and would have immediately shown that there was a problem, long before the paper was even published. I don’t like to sound this way, but it’s true: in the drug industry, we consider pharmacokinetic data like this to be essential when interpreting an animal study.

Continue reading →