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There are horror stories in any field. You should have included specific drug trials that have resulted in saving lives, and there have been many. VALARIE MCGEE Atlanta...
That's when Mathias wrote her whistle-blowing letter. On the basis of its investigation, the OHRP shut down all federally funded human research at the university. The university, meanwhile, did its own digging and came to the same conclusions. It disbanded the Tulsa IRB, suspended and later fired McGee, and terminated Plunket and Brooks as well. And on July 7, 2000, it sent a new letter to McGee's subjects. This one admitted that "in fact, the trial was closed because of possible safety concerns...
Insisting that patients be given the unvarnished truth about clinical trials might scare many away. But that doesn't bother Alan Milstein, an attorney who has represented Jesse Gelsinger's family, as well as many of the participants in McGee's study. "The biggest myth out there," Milstein says, "is that every one of these studies is essential to the advancement of medicine. That's just nonsense. Most have to do with the advancement of the researcher himself." If it were just a lawyer talking, that sentiment might be easy to dismiss. But Marcia Angell expresses a similar criticism...
Luckily for many of the patients in Dr. Michael McGee's vaccine trial, Cherlynn Mathias already had that attitude--though she has paid a price for her action. Facing nasty criticism from many of her colleagues at the University of Oklahoma and worried she would not be able to get decent medical treatment in Tulsa, she finally moved to Texas last August. Sometimes she wonders whether she did the right thing by sending that letter to the OHRP, but she is proud of the way the university responded...
...doesn't say the same for her former boss, though. "What hurt me so much was that McGee allowed some of the patients to believe that the only reason they were dying was that they had been forced to stop taking his drug. Many of them died," she says, "believing I was responsible for their deaths." The truth is that she was responsible only for shattering their illusions. --With reporting by Alice Park/Baltimore