Slate has retracted a story about controversial bioethicist Glenn McGee and his involvement with Celltex Therapeutics, a Texas-based company that says it extracts and banks stem cells from people’s fat. Where the story by University of Minnesota bioethicist Carl Elliott once appeared now sits this editor’s note: Continue reading Updated: Slate retracts story on Glenn McGee and Celltex following lawsuit threats, as McGee resigns from company
Category: Legal Threats
Elsevier ob-gyn journal retracted paper after legal threat
When we broke the story last week about a juicy retraction notice in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology (AJOG) — known by its readers as “the Gray Journal” — we wrote that there was more to it than we suspected. That’s an understatement.
As we reported, the AJOG retracted an article that it had published earlier this year because 1) the author, Laurence Cole, had failed to disclose a potential financial conflict of interest with a pregnancy test maker named Church & Dwight; and 2) the article lacked a “credible scientific reason given for conducting the study,” along with other flaws detailed in the notice. (As we wrote the other day, we wonder why those issues did not arise during the initial review of the manuscript — but more on that shortly.)
We’ve since learned that the journal’s move came after it received a sharply worded letter from a high-powered San Francisco lawyer demanding immediate retraction of the article on the grounds that it represented a “substantial” threat to the financial health of his client. That client? A maker of home pregnancy tests who is now in the process of suing the very firm that provided Cole with research funding he failed to disclose.
First, here’s what Cole, the hormone expert at the University of New Mexico whose paper the journal retracted, said about why he didn’t disclose that funding: Continue reading Elsevier ob-gyn journal retracted paper after legal threat
Retractile dysfunction? Author says journal yanked paper linking Viagra, Cialis to vision problem after legal threats
The British Journal of Ophthalmology has retracted a 2006 paper which purported to show a link between drugs for erectile dysfunction and a rare form of sudden vision loss called non-arteritic anterior ischaemic optic neuropathy, more commonly known as “Viagra blindness.”
That wouldn’t be terribly interesting, except for this: One of the authors of the paper, a researcher at the University of Alabama named Gerald McGwin Jr., told us that the journal retracted the article because it had become a tool in a lawsuit involving Pfizer, which makes Viagra, and, presumably, men who’d developed blindness after taking the drug:
The article just became too much of a pain in the rear end. It became one of those things where we couldn’t provide all the relevant documentation [to the university, which had to provide records for attorneys]
Ultimately, however, McGwin said that the BJO pulled the plug on the paper.
It was really the journal’s decision to take it out of the literature.
The retraction notice is mute on the reason for the retraction of the blindness paper (and, so far, our requests for comment seem to have fallen on deaf ears). Here’s all it says: Continue reading Retractile dysfunction? Author says journal yanked paper linking Viagra, Cialis to vision problem after legal threats