On Medical and Science Ethics: The MMR Vaccine Fiasco

There is a reason why I am a student of a science heavily focused on public health.  Human population health is important to me.  In my view, a healthy society is a productive one, and a healthy environment with accurate science is the most conducive to human health.  Therefore, in the quest for knowledge about health, the issue of scientific and medical ethics is near and dear to my heart.

There are a multitude of ethical quandaries that the average scientist wades through during their career.  If your data aren't as nice looking as you'd hoped, the standard deviations a bit further from how you expected them to be, you might be tempted to alter results a little bit to make it fit your expectations.  If you're doing a study on human or animal subjects, you might be tempted to take short cuts for the sake of reducing cost/energy/work.  If your study is paid for by an interest group, you might feel pressured to ensure your data fits the expectations of your financial backers.  It would seem as though these are all obvious, black-and-white, cut-and-dry issues.  Clearly, you think, I will just report the data as they are.  I will run the experiment in the best way with the best statistics I can afford.  If the interest groups don't like the results, well that is the risk of science.  Unfortunately, not everyone is able to overcome their personal interests or those of their financiers.   Even more unfortunately, these ethical mistakes can have huge implications on public health.

The MMR vaccine is a combination vaccine protecting the body against the mumps, measles, and rubella.  These three diseases used to be common afflictions, but they could be quite dangerous, and if left unchecked for too long, or if the body doesn't respond to medications, can lead to permanent injury or death. They are also quite infectious, and it used to be that almost every single child would get at least one of the three diseases in their lives.  The MMR vaccine was developed to protect children from these illnesses.  However, some anecdotal evidence suggested that the MMR vaccine was administered to some children who immediately started showing signs of autism, a developmental abnormality that leads to varying degrees of behavioral disorders.

Andrew Wakefield was a medical researcher who conducted a study based on these claims and suggested that within days after vaccination with MMR the 12 children in his study had developed symptoms of autism and gastrointestinal issues.  These results were recorded and published in a 1998 Lancet article entitled "Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children."  The publishing of this article subsequently led to a drop in vaccination rates and a surge in childhood disease rates.
In 2003, a British journalist named Brian Deer launched an investigation into this research and discovered that Dr. Wakefield's findings were not what they seemed.   Dr. Wakefield had received money from a law firm wishing to pursue a lawsuit against the vaccine companies, but he had not listed this as a potential conflict of interest in the publishing process of his paper.  He also had not disclosed that the 12 anonymous children participating in his study were very carefully selected by anti-MMR campaign groups to provide specific evidence.  Anyone who has ever taken a statistics class knows that the key to statistical relevance and true scientific research is that your samples must be as random as possible.  Another key is that your sample size must be as large as possible.  12 subjects that were hand-picked for the cause is not a good scientific approach to the problem.  Small studies should make way for larger studies, and subsequent research inquiries with larger sample sizes were never able to replicate the results that Dr. Wakefield published.

The study was since retracted but the damage is far-reaching.  Many parents are still hesitant to vaccinate their children because of the fear of regressive autism.  Some of my cousins refuse to vaccinate their children, fabricating exclusions based on religion in order to allow their children into public schools where vaccinations are required.  I even have friends who have not vaccinated their children because they fear the "jury is out" when it comes to whether vaccines cause autism.  For me the biggest issue is that with all the blame placed on the MMR vaccine causing autism, the true roots of the disorders are not actively being sought and the issue will indefinitely persist.  It is an injustice to the very nature of science and public health.

This example of unethical scientific conduct is far reaching and extreme, but even smaller issues may have unintended consequences, and the risk to public health is not worth a paper being published when the methods and financial backers are not fully disclosed.

If Lady Gaga were a doctoral student

If there was a movie made of my life, where the mistakes weren't my fault and there was more dancing and costumes made out of serological pipette tips, then this music video parodying Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" would be it.
Sadly, the issues with my project all stem from my own ineptitude.  Today, I literally had to throw a $500 kit into the trash after making a critical error, ruining the plate, at the 2nd-to-last step.  After 8 hours of working on it.  Pro-tip:  Always, ALWAYS, ALWAYS double check your pipette settings.  Even if you normally use the exact same pipette for the exact same thing and you were the last person to use your pipette for what you thought was the exact same thing.  It is a habit you will thank me for when you are trying to multitask and catch yourself about to pipette 100 ul of solution into a well where only 25 ul should go; then you will rectify the issue and you won't run out of your solution before the plate is actually filled.

Regarding reallocating lab supplies for clothing efforts, I feel guilty even considering making a pipette corset, those things are like $0.90 each!  Would they still be sterile after a night on the town?  Could I still do cell culture with them when I tire of the outfit?  And then there's the issue regarding the fact that I actually can't dance.  Maybe I can be the backup dancer in a disposable biohazard suit in someone else's lab life.

Forgive my frustrated post today.  All is eventually well; I still have enough sample for another plate so I'll order another kit.  An expensive mistake was made, but it is definitely a mistake that I won't ever make again.

The Sad Grad, or the post in which I introduce myself

I am a grad student at a small university in a small town encased within a small valley.

The views are beautiful,  the people are great and the buses are free...so perhaps woeful is the wrong term to describe my general demeanor as a resident of this gorgeous place.  We'll run with it anyway because of all of the sad phenomena that affect me:  horrible winter air quality, increasing tuition rates, and the difficulty in procuring fresh vegetables 9 months of the year, to name a few.

My Master's project research is on the impact of the air pollution on human health.  I collect and study human blood samples and compare it to results obtained from exposing petri dish cells to the same pollutants.  My hobby 'research' projects include local and global feminism, soil science, nutrition and politics.  All of these topics and more may come up in future blog posts.  They'll probably be brought up in conjunction with one another.

In my personal life, the aspect most important to me is my family; namely my husband and our pets.  I married my high school sweet heart, now a full-time grad student at the same university.  My husband studies inorganic chemistry and has a disdain for biochemistry (which is silly because biochemistry is clearly the more interesting topic).  His lab coat is much, much grosser than mine; likewise his lab bench.  We are both massive science nerds who wear thick glasses and have poor fashion sense.  I like him a lot!  As for our menagerie, our little zoo includes a precocious puppy, a callous cat, and two grumpy goldfish.  The trend has been to adopt a new pet or two every year:  the puppy was rescued from the local humane society two weeks ago, the cat was rehomed from a local foster pet service two years ago, and the goldfish were found in an empty classroom three years ago.  There was a mouse that I lifted from a live trap in a grain research lab last year (to continue a trend of a new pet every year) but died just after the dog entered our home (fright?  too much attention?  old age?  I'll never know the cause, only the heartbreak).

I'm not very good at taking pictures, so here's one my husband took to help prove what a beautiful view I enjoy every single day (except on bad air days, sigh):