Activism, science and a UBC prof.
JOURNAL RETRACTION OF VACCINE STUDY INVOLVING UBC RESEARCHERS FUELS CONTROVERSY
In an interview with the University of British Columbia student newspaper nearly 20 years ago, research scientist Chris Shaw said the last thing an academic wanted was to be “associated with something iffy.”
Reminded of that quote recently, Shaw said: “I guess I should’ve taken my advice.”
Shaw is a professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences whose research revolves around the causes of neurological diseases. He recently came under scrutiny after members of the scientific community raised concerns about a journal article he co- authored suggesting a link between aluminum components in vaccines and autism in mice.
Shaw later acknowledged the article contained “compromised data” and altered images, prompting the article’s retraction. He said he is still trying to get to the bottom of how it happened. “No one wants answers to how this came about more than I do,” he said.
In the meantime, Shaw, who was the co- author of another journal article that was withdrawn last year, has been accused in the blogosphere of blurring the lines between activism and science and engaging in “pseudo-scientific garbage.”
But Shaw i nsists t hat while he is a social activist on political issues, ranging from the Olympics to pipelines, any sort of strident activism stops when it comes to his research. While he likes to push the envelope — “I don’t want to do boring stuff; I don’t want to do stuff where everybody thinks the same thing” — he rejects the accusation that he is an antivaccine crusader.
“Am I committed to finding aluminum in vaccines is toxic for humans? No, I’m not,” he said.
“If you look at my published stuff, there’s been negative results, positive results and ambiguous results. We publish whatever there is.”
UBC administrators said in a statement: “We are aware of statements attributed to Dr. Christopher Shaw in media reports that would suggest a clear breach of the university’s policy on scholarly integrity. If true, those statements would be of great concern to the university. While privacy law prevents the university from commenting on a specific case or the results of a specific investigation, we can say that breaches of the kind described would warrant an investigation under our scholarly integrity policy.” ( As of Tuesday, Shaw said he was not aware of any investigation by UBC).
Gail Murphy, UBC’s vicepresident of research, also said in a statement that the university “holds dear the value of academic freedom that allows faculty to challenge any and all established conventions.”
Science ethics experts told the National Post they don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with activism in science, as long as researchers don’t fudge their results or ignore findings to fit a particular agenda and are open about where their funding comes from.
They said academic institutions should encourage scientists to engage the public more with the results of their research and shouldn’t be afraid if researchers pursue controversial topics.
“Just because someone is thinking against the grain doesn’t mean they’re a crank, as long as they’re careful with evidence,” said Heather Douglas, a University of Waterloo philosophy professor specializing in values in sci- ence and science policy.
Shaw is no stranger to controversy. In the late 1990s, another UBC professor accused Shaw of allowing a thesis student to use unethical research techniques, prompting an investigation.
“Allegations of fraudulent behaviour can carry a lot of weight,” Shaw told the Ubyssey student newspaper at the time. “The last thing ( anyone) wants is to be associated with something iffy.”
A panel later cleared Shaw of wrongdoing and his accuser apologized after Shaw sued him for libel.
Shaw continued to generate headlines as an outspoken critic of the World Trade Organization and NAFTA. In 2000, he even ran for political office federally under the fringe Canadian Action Party banner.
“Will I be elected into Parliament? Probably not,” he said at the time. “But part of the patriotic chore is to try to educate your fellow citizens.” ( He received 390 votes — or 0.8 per cent of the vote).
In 2013, CBC News uncovered documents showing that the RCMP had been monitoring Shaw for several months during the lead- up to the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver. He had been a vocal critic of the Games.
The most recent controversy followed publication in September of an article in the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry that purported to show that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines triggered immune responses in mice that were “consistent with those in autism.”
Soon after, commenters on PubPeer, an online forum that allows informal “postpublication peer review,” began to identify problems with the paper, alleging that images had been duplicated and control results had been removed.
Shaw says after his lab rechecked the data figures and realized there were problems, he immediately notified UBC administrators and the journal’s editor.
The website Retraction Watch broke the news of the allegations and the decision by Shaw and his team to pull the paper. Elsevier, the journal’s publisher, apologized that the errors were not caught sooner.
Shaw said attempts are being made to locate the ori- ginal data. The lead author, Dan Li, a former post- doctoral research fellow in his lab, took the images and lab notebooks with her when she left the lab, in contravention of UBC policy, he said.
Asked about the alleged removal of original data from the lab, the retracted article and her working relationship with Shaw, Li had “no comments,” Neil MacLean, Li’s lawyer, said in an email this week.
However, she “stands by her conclusion that the activities of several immune factors were increased in mice after being injected with aluminum,” the lawyer said.
One of Shaw’s harshest critics, David Gorski, a professor at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Michigan, went to his blog and accused Shaw and one of his regular collaborators, Lucija Tomljenovic, a UBC post-doctoral fellow, of publishing “nothing but antivaccine pseudo- science that anti-vaxxers love to cite” and questioned why UBC continues to “put up with crap like this?”
“If this were a first offence, I’d give Shaw and Tomljenovic the benefit of the doubt, but this is far from their first offence,” he wrote.
Gorski was alluding to another paper that Shaw and Tomljenovic had contributed to, purporting to show adverse effects of aluminum adjuvants in the human papillomavirus ( HPV) vaccine Gardasil. That paper was withdrawn from the journal Vaccine in 2016 due to what the journal described as “serious concerns regarding the scientific soundness of the article” and methodology that was “seriously flawed.”
Shaw insists the science was solid and noted the paper was later republished in a different journal after modifications. He went on to suggest that attacks on his work and those of his colleagues could be coming from the pharmaceutical industry.
“There is a pattern for industry to try and paint the scientists who do any studies that might be considered problematic for their product,” he said.
Tomljenovic suggested in an email that the problems with the most recent vaccine paper were the result of “intentional sabotage.”
The paper underwent review for nine months prior to publication and nothing came up. “But the bloggers caught it right away. How is that possible?” she said.
“I do believe the truth will come out.”
Anytime researchers attempt to look at secondary effects of vaccines, they are automatically — and unfairly — labelled anti-vaccine, said Lluis Lujan, a researcher in Spain who has collaborated with Shaw on different projects.
“We only try to apply a reasonable, balanced approach between benefits and risks,” he said by email.
Critics, however, point out that much of Shaw’s vaccine research funding has come from the U.S.-based Dwoskin Family Foundation, which is considered by some to be a big player in the anti-vaccine movement.
The foundation’s website says it funds research with a “heavy emphasis on determining whether vaccines and their ingredients are safe, necessary and linked to certain diseases.”
The foundation is linked to the Children’s Medical Safety Research Institute, whose stated mission is addressing “eroding public confidence in national vaccine policies due to concerns about safety.”
The institute cites on its home page a “landmark” 2013 research paper that showed “the more children receive vaccines with aluminum adjuvants, the greater their chance is of developing autism, autoimmune diseases and neurological problems later in life.”
But the paper, authored by Shaw, suggested only a “highly significant correlation.”
Shaw, who sits on the institute’s scientific advisory board, acknowledged the way the institute characterized his work was misleading.
“We never said that in the paper. People are going to interpret things in a certain way,” he said.
Asked why he had not bothered to have it corrected, he said he didn’t regularly look at the institute’s website.
“The same way the Dwoskins don’t tell me what to do, I kind of don’t tell them what to do either. I can’t police everything that’s out there.”
In an email, Claire Dwoskin, the foundation’s co-founder, accused the Post of focusing on “superficial details” and said the media seemed more interested in “defending the status quo than in discovering what is at the root of these devastating and costly conditions.”
When the retraction issue bubbled up a few weeks ago, Shaw and Tomljenvoic were getting ready to release a new book they had co-edited with Dwoskin and Lujan called Controversies in Vaccine Safety.
But in light of the journal retraction, Shaw said he and Tomljenovic decided to remove their names and their chapter from the book.
“We didn’t want people to say, ‘ Aha! Just another antivacc(ine) book. Look at Shaw and Tomljenovic. We know them,’ ” he said.
A spokesman for Elsevier, the book’s publisher, said this week authors of several other chapters have since decided to withdraw their contributions in the wake of the controversy and the book has been cancelled.
Shaw says he will most likely start pulling away from vaccine research as the level of vitriol directed at his work has become too difficult to bear.
“Maybe this is an area that I’ ll leave to other hands, because who needs this kind of grief in research, right?”
JUST BECAUSE SOMEONE IS THINKING AGAINST THE GRAIN DOESN’T MEAN THEY’RE A CRANK, AS LONG AS THEY’RE CAREFUL WITH EVIDENCE.