Brill's Content, October 1998: 105ff.

Flawed Science at the Times

by Sheryl Fragin

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Page 109:

Sidebar: A Kolata Sample Analysis

 Given a set of questions about specific stories she has written, Gina Kolata faxed back several brief answers, ignored a few subjects, and in some cases went into considerable detail. Those longer replies, as discussed below, may be apt examples of the problems critics say pervade her work. --Sheila Frogin

 On why, with all that she's written disputing that sperm counts are dropping, she ignored a report by Shanna Swan that disagreed with her position--although Swan had been asked by a National Academy of Sciences committee to get to the bottom of the controversy:

KOLATA

 "If Shanna Swan had been asked by the National Academy of Sciences to review the sperm data, that would indeed have been a story. But she was not; she did her analysis on her own, and sent out a press release that erroneously implied that she was a member of the National Academy. [O]ur decision was to reject the report because it was not published in a major peer-reviewed journal and because of her own reputation as a scientist whose analyses have not held up to scrutiny. For example, she was cited by three courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, as someone whose analyses were not scientifically credible. Most recently, when she wanted to testify as an expert witness on breast implants in Oregon, Judge Jones, on the advice of disinterested scientists, barred her testimony...."

THE FACTS
 
 

• Swan is a member of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Hormonally Active Agents in the Environment and was indeed asked to do the review, according to Carol Maczka, a project director for the committee. It is intended to be part of a major report on endocrine disrupters, which are chemicals that mimic the body's hormones. As was her prerogative, Swan chose to publish her research for that report in a scientific journal first.

 

 

• The press release was put out by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health, which published Swan's report in its monthly journal, Environmental Health Perspectives. The release doesn't mention the academy.

 

 

• Environmental Health Perspectives is an important, peer-reviewed journal whose articles are routinely covered in the press.

 

 

• In the 1993 Supreme Court case Kolata refers to, the question was whether a circuit court was correct in not allowing Swan and seven others to testify in a birth-defects case. The justices ordered the lower court to reconsider, noting the "impressive credentials" of the banned expert witnesses. Writing for the majority, Justice Blackmun even singled out Swan for praise: "For example, Shanna Helen Swan, who received a master's degree in biostatistics from Columbia University and a doctorate in statistics from the University of California at Berkeley, is chief of the section of the California Department of Health and Services that determines causes of birth defects, and has served as a consultant to the World Health Organization, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health." In any case, the issue was always about the nature of the experts' testimony and not about their expertise.

 

 

• Judge Robert Jones ruled that no woman in Oregon could bring a case claiming systemic disease, since he felt the science wasn't strong enough to put to a jury. That meant no one could testify. It was a highly controversial decision--not least because the judge's own wife has a breast implant, which she and her husband apparently consider safe enough to leave in her body. "[I]f she had problems, she is the type who wouldn't complain about them...," Jones said about his wife at a 1996 hearing, before declining to recuse himself from implant cases.