Published January 24, 2025
In 2023 my colleagues and I were preparing to enroll patients in a clinical trial of a new drug that promised to mitigate brain damage in stroke victims. The National Institutes of Health, a governmental organization that funds billions of dollars of research every year, had committed $30 million to the trial. The drug was, in part, the brainchild of Berislav Zlokovic, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California.
Then, suddenly, the NIH paused the trial. Charles Piller, an investigative journalist for Science magazine, had published an article alleging that multiple papers from Dr. Zlokovic, including many supporting the new drug, contained seemingly altered data. Though Dr. Zlokovic disputed some of the concerns, this news stunned us. We might have put patients at risk, while offering groundless hope. A fraud of the sort Mr. Piller described would violate the basic ethics of clinical trials and overturn the presumption of trust on which the practice of medicine relies.
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Aaron Rothstein, M.D., is an EPPC fellow in the Bioethics and American Democracy Program and an attending neurovascular physician and neuroepidemiologist. He completed his neurovascular fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania and his residency in neurology at the NYU School of Medicine. He received a B.A. in History from Yale University and his M.D. from the Wake Forest School of Medicine.