Science Friday - Medical Conflict Of Interest, Saturn’s Rings, Bear Brook Podcast. Jan 25, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: January 25, 2019

Most scientific journals go by the honor system when it comes to conflicts of interest: They ask, and the researchers tell. But that system might be due for an overhaul. A recent ProPublica and New York Times investigation found that a top cancer researcher at Sloan Kettering had received millions of dollars in payments from health and drug companies, but failed to disclose his industry ties in more than 100 articles. Within days, the researcher resigned, more conflicts came to light, leading to a moment of reckoning for the institution. But a more recent investigation shows the problem goes far beyond Sloan Kettering. New York Times reporter Katie Thomas, a co-author of the recent investigations, and Eric Campbell, a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado, discuss how these conflicts of interests could affect patients, why they aren’t being consistently disclosed, and what’s being done about the problem. Saturn stands out in our solar system because of the rings that circle the planet. But the rings may not have always been there and may disappear in the far future. Researchers using data collected by Cassini’s final plunge into the planet were able to estimate the mass of the rings. From this information they were able to estimate that the rings were between 10 to 100 million years old, much younger than the planet itself. The finding were published in the journal Science. Planetary scientist Burkhard Militzer, who was an author on the study, tells us what the rings of Saturn can reveal about the formation of the solar system and universe. Last year’s arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo, better known as the Golden State Killer, drew lots of attention for the clever use of consumer genetic testing websites to identify a suspect—and for all the murky ethical questions that came with it. But this wasn’t the first time law enforcement had used the technique to solve a cold case. Detectives looking for DeAngelo took their inspiration from an earlier case in New Hampshire, known as the “Bear Brook murders.” In that case, police were up against both an unknown killer and unidentified victims, until they relied on the genealogy database GEDmatch to help them with a crack in the case. It was a strategy that would change the game for forensic investigations in cold case murders. And the story of how it all got started is now told in a new true crime podcast from New Hampshire Public Radio called Bear Brook. Jason Moon, reporter for New Hampshire Public Radio and host of the podcast joins guest host John Dankosky to discuss.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. Ira Flato is away. Later in the hour, we're talking about conflicts of interest and researchers who aren't disclosing them to journals. If you're a medical professional, we'd like to hear from you. How do you approach conflicts of interest? Give us a call. Our numbers 844-724-8255. That's 844-Sai talk, or you can always tweet us at SciFRI. But first, in our solar system, there's one planet that is immediately identifiable. Saturn with its iconic rings. Saturn just wouldn't be Saturn without that cosmic halo, but those rings weren't always there. The planet didn't put a ring on it until relatively recently. They're estimated to have formed 10 to 100 million years ago, billions of years after the planet formed. Researchers were able to give an age to the rings using data from the final dive of the Cassini mission. Their results were published in the journal Science. My next guest is here to fill us in. Burkhard Militzer is an author on that study. He's a professor of Earth and planetary

science and of astronomy at the University of California at Berkeley. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for being here. Hello. It's great to be on the show. Saturn has four groups of rings around it. Let's start there. What are these rings made of? So we can judge them from the color. We've never actually took a sample of. So we have to tell from remote observations what they're made of. And from the color, we can tell what the ratio within ice and the rocky component is. They're mostly ice. So we also think they started out as almost purely icy objects. Started out as mostly ice and they've gotten more rocky over time?

That's exactly right. So we can estimate how many meteorite hits these rings over time, and they progressively come slightly more darker every millions of years or so. So there's an influx of meteorites the same way that meteorites hit the Earth, and we know how many are hitting the Earth every year. We know also how many hit Saturn every year, but nothing so often. So what are some ideas about how these rings were formed? What are the theories that are out there? To be honest, the most fundamental question was actually originally we thought, and I thought, that the rings are as old as the planet.

And that is now what we are now refuting. think the rings formed very recently, and then we have to come up with another sort of mechanism. So there are two ideas, what could have happened, something totally drastic. The wings are billions of icy particles. So you have to have some drastic mechanism to get them there in place.

And what we happened, some bigger object got blown into pieces. And there are two scenarios. We're not sure which one's right. But one is that there was a big comet from the Kuiper belt that somehow got scattered, and it got in the gravity field of Saturn, and it got closer and it got disrupted by Saturn.

And then you have so many ring products left. So from the Kuiper belt, that is one of the driving arguments, that some bigger object got disrupted by Saturn's gravity. So most planets don't have rings. What's special about Saturn that has allowed the planet to form these rings around it and maintain them over these years? So if you look very, very carefully, you find faint rings around all the giant planet. So Jupiter has one, and Uranus and Neptunes have very faint rings as well.

But Sardov has one that is so prominent, that makes it so special. So there's quite a lot of mass, a lot of particles. And the reason maintaining them is not that difficult because the ring particles follow the same trajectories like a moon, so they're relatively stable over time. But the question is how you get so many particles at just an exquisite location. Because if you are slightly out of the orbit with the other ring particles, you're bound to hit the other ring particles at some point when you go around Saturn, and then you get kicked out of the orbit.

So you have to have many particles all perfectly aligned. And we think we have many, many more particles, and those who are not in line just get kicked out of the orbits around Saturn. Many of them were fine aligned and they are still there today. What else is special about Saturn, though? I understand it spins very fast for such a large planet. So the gravity around Saturn must be interesting. Does that have anything to do with the rings? Well, that's exactly.

What the Cassini spacecraft did in its last 25 orbits before actually burned up in the atmosphere of Saturn, it measured the gravity field. And I was on the team anticipating these measurements and what I'm a theorist. So what we do is before our external colleagues make the observations, we give them some numbers what they should find. So we did lots of calculations in the year before these measurements were made. And we told our Italian colleague, you know, we met the gravity field, told them this number should be within minus 9 and minus 8.5. And you were sure it would be in between these numbers.

And then they measured minus 14. So at that point, we're totally puzzled because Saturn's gravity field was totally different from all the models we constructed before. And the reason was that Saturn has a very deep wind. So we left them out of the models. Now we know that the wings that we see from the clouds that we've seen before, they're not just very thin sort of surface clouds like we see on our planet. They're super deep. And they go about 9,000 or possibly more kilometers into the planet.

And the winds are moving slightly faster than the rest of Saturn. And that changes the gravity field. They're so massive. And that's what the spacecraft picked up. That was the one remarkable measurement. And the other one was it measured the mass of the rings. And that was equally important. Yeah, and tell us more about that, about the mass of the rings.

So just the first time that the mass of the rings was determined from gravity. And you needed to go in between the rings so that the rings are pulling you out, while the mass as planet pulls you the other way. Then you can really nicely detect the signal from the rings. And they are not that heavy. They are about, I don't know, 1, 4,000th of the mass of our moon. But now we have this number very accurately. And we can really say that the rings are not massive.

And from that mass measurement, and the color of the wings that tell us the rock-to-ice ratio and the information, how many rocky components are added to the rings every year, we can extrapolate back in time, and we can say when the rings have formed. And that's not 4.5 billion years ago. This is almost yesterday. This is like 100 million years ago. So there must have been something really drastic happening around Saturn relatively recently. And that produced the rings.

Does that suggest to you, though, that these rings are somewhat ephemeral, that as quickly as they were formed not too terribly long ago, that they could disappear again. someday relatively soon? Well, I think not tomorrow. I think it's good if you want to have a look at that and you can go tomorrow, but next week it will still be there and then you retire, you're safe. But they do degrade.

So the ring particles, you think like the rings are all perfectly stable. But if you, we get better and better spacecraft data, we see how dynamic there are. And the best analogy is actually the Earth's Ocean. If you look from far away, it's just a smooth surface. But if you're actually on it, you see there waves and sometimes there are bigger waves. And similarly, that happens in the Saturnian ring system. You lose particles because they drift in and they've swallowed up by Saturn. And sometimes there's a moon embedded in the rings.

And then that comes by, it leaves a big wake in the ring particles nearby. So there's some loss. So over we think now 100 million years, maybe they're going to be very, very faint or almost gone. in 100 million years. You think they were more massive when they started out and they're losing mass over time gradually. I have to ask you quickly because this is based on this amazing trip of Cassini that crashes into Saturn and gives you all this information on the way down. If you can just describe the path that Cassini took as it was gathering this data for you flying between the rings and Saturn. So the Cassini spacecraft has been in orbit around Saturn. Saturn,

for 13 years and it flew by the moons and they made very intricate orbit calculation for everything, but they saved the best for last. And if you look at these orbits, the rings are, they look big, but if you're at the Cassini spacecraft, your orbit was far outside the ring system. So they had to break a little bit to just dive on the inside. And that is, it can all be done and calculated and do with high precision, but you're never quite sure that you wouldn't run into one of those errant ring particles just happened to drift in your trajectory. Nothing happened, but the risk was not zero. So they calculated it and they

went inside the rings, which meant they had to come really, really close to the surface, go through the gap of the inner most wing and the surface of the planet, and then go back out and the orbits are very elliptical. They have the size of like 15 the diameter of Saturn. So they only come for a short moment in this small gap, relatively small, and then they go back out. They're very elliptical and come back. And they close, especially gravity field, which made all these two observations possible, the deep winds and the mass of the rings. And then they came closer and they got a little bit of a snippet from the atmosphere. Look what molecules there are, that's hydrogen and helium, and what their ratios and so on. So what does all this ring data tell us about a picture of how

Saturn was formed and how honestly the entire solar system was formed. What can you learn from this? So we get the first of all, the fact that the wings are so young, it tells us our solar system even today is not perfectly stable as we think it is. There's still collisions. So like a hundred million years something happened there. We know there was a big impact, 65 million years ago on our planet. So in the million-year time scale, there's still sizable impact or drastic events. That's the first thing. So the other thing, which is a little indirect, that's why we actually fly these missions.

We want to understand what was, how did the solar system form, and how many rocks, and how much ice was there available, and how were they distributed? And the rocks in the ice, you know, these particles collided, and they made the four rocky planets in the inner part of the solar system. there was more ice than they made the giant planets in the outer part of the solar system. You understand this better. We have an idea what happens, but the details are really murky. The details are murky, and hopefully we'll find out more details over time.

But this is fascinating. Burkhard Militzer is a professor of Earth and planetary science and of astronomy at the University of California at Berkeley. Thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Coming up, not all doctors are disclosing their conflicts of interests in journals. How bad is this problem and what is being done about it? That's coming back right after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. Ira Flato is away. When you submit a paper to a

medical journal, one thing you're supposed to do is disclose any conflicts of interest you might have, like payments from drug makers or relationships with biotech companies, anything that could consciously or unconsciously bias your findings, anything that people reading should really know about. But over the past few months, investigations by ProPublica and the New York Times have shown that the honor system has major cracks in it. Journals are asking, but a lot of the time, doctors aren't telling. Katie Thomas is a reporter at the New York Times who co-authored one of these recent investigations, and she's here to tell us what she found. Katie Thomas, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me.

And if you're a medical professional, we'd like to hear from you. How do you approach conflicts of interest? And give us a call to ask your questions or give us your thoughts at 844. 724-8255. That's 844-Sci Talk, or you can tweet us at SciFri. First of all, this is amazing reporting, Katie. Maybe you can start by telling us how this investigation first came about. Sure. It started several months before our first story when my colleague, Charles Ornstein, at ProPublica, just got a tip from a reader who had pointed us to the chief medical officer at the time at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. His name is Dr. Jose Bissellga. And he's a leading cancer researcher, very, very well known in the field.

And this reader just pointed us to the fact that in many of his journal articles and in conference presentations and other public appearances, he wasn't reporting any disclosures, even though, you know, if you dig around even just a little bit on the Internet, you can see that he had multiple relationships with a lot of different companies. So we thought that was interesting, particularly. just because he was such a leader in the field. And we started looking for ourselves

and ended up writing a story about it in September of 2018. So you're suggesting it wasn't really hard to find out that he had some of these potential conflicts and that he wasn't really disclosing them. Right. Some of them are easy and some of them were harder. But the first place that we looked and, you know, that we were surprised that, you know, that he had gone so long without disclosing

because some of this was so simple to look up, was a federal database called Open Payments. And on that database, anyone can enter a doctor's name in and see a list of payments that the drug companies and device companies pay to doctors. And that wasn't all of the, I can get into the details about how that's not everything, but it showed us that he had some significant relationships with major drug companies that weren't being reported. Maybe you can talk more about the types of conflicts we're talking about and maybe even just describe what we mean by conflicts here, because I think a lot of people

who aren't in this field might not understand what a conflict is that should be disclosed. Sure. Yeah, and there's a wide range of relationships that doctors or researchers will have with drug companies. And just stepping back a little bit, a lot of people will say, you know, there's nothing wrong with it. And in fact, some collaboration with the industry is really necessary. I mean, after all, the drug and the device industry are the ones that bring us our new medications. and our new devices and all of the things that are life-saving that we as a society really need. And of course, we would expect those companies to be consulting with the leading scientific researchers. I mean, that's something that I think everyone wants.

But the issue that we looked at was disclosure and transparency. You know, how much are these researchers disclosing these relationships and how much are they getting paid and in what form? So there's a range of types of relationships. There's consulting relationships where they get paid a straight payment for work that they do. There's a lot of work, and this is something that we ended up reporting on quite a bit, that doctors do with startups. And those are not as easily discovered some of those relationships. And often those are also in the form of things like stock options, ownership, equity stakes. not just straightforward payments.

And I mean, those are probably the main areas. There's speaking engagements. There's all kinds of interactions that doctors have with drug companies. But that role right up to people serving on boards of drug companies, which puts them into a real conflict of interest because they're supposed to do right by their university or their research facility. But they've also, if they're a member of a board, of a company, they've also got to do right by shareholders. That's right, and that's a key issue that we ended up looking more closely at. So Dr. Bissellga, who was the first article that we wrote about, was on the board of two publicly

traded companies. He was on the board of Bristol-Myers Squibb, a drug company, and varying medical systems, which makes radiation equipment. Both of those are involved in the cancer field, and here he is a top executive at Memorial Sloan Kettering. And when you serve on the board of a company, as you pointed out, you have a fiduciary duty to that company. And so the question that we asked is, is that a conflict of interest when you are, you know, when you're a top leader at a nonprofit medical center like Memorial Sloan Kettering,

and you also are on the board of a publicly traded company? What has happened at Sloan Kettering since your articles came out? They've made a number of changes. Dr. Bissellga, a couple days after our first story, he resigned. He later stepped down from the boards of Bristol-Myers Squib and Varian. The chief executive, Dr. Craig Thompson, he was also on the board of Merck and another board called Charles River. And he eventually stepped down from those two companies as well. We did several other stories that took a closer look at the relationships that Memorial Sloan Kettering and its leaders had with companies. And they ended up making several changes as a result of our reporting.

The most recent one was that they said that the leaders of their company would no longer. serve on corporate boards, that that was a new policy that they decided to pass. I want to bring on another guest who's been researching these conflicts of interest in medicine and how we tackle them. Eric Campbell is a professor of medicine and director of research at the University of Colorado's Center for Bioethics and Humanities. Eric Campbell, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for being here. Thank you, John. Hi, Katie. Hi. Eric, I'll start with you, and I'd love Katie's thoughts on this, too. How widespread is this

problem. We've been talking so far about this one high profile case that was a lead story from ProPublica and the New York Times, but this goes much deeper than Sloan Kettering, certainly. Yeah, I think the evidence. There's actually people that do research on how often researchers fail to disclose, and the findings are pretty consistent that, you know, in most journals, it's probably somewhere around 20 to 30 percent of people fail to fully disclose conflicts of interest, it's difficult because when you're dealing with physicians who are researchers, it's pretty easy to find out if they disclose because you can just look them up in the open payments database. But the issue is when you're dealing with PhDs because they're not

included in that database. And that becomes it much more difficult to accurately estimate the frequency with which people fail to disclose. I should say that on the topic of disclosure, you told us that you wanted to disclose a conflict of interest yourself. So what is it? Oh, absolutely. In the spirit of our discussion, in addition to being a professor at the University of Colorado, I currently serve as a paid expert witness in law cases against drug companies related to conflicts of interest in medicine and research. So this is something you've been studying for quite some time, and it's something that you've testified about as well. Yes, I testified twice before the U.S. Senate and in law cases as well.

So these conflict of interests aren't a new problem. We're talking about the current state right now, but over the last 20 years or so, Eric Campbell, what has been done? What have people been doing to try to solve this problem? Yeah, it actually dates back to the 50s when there were Senate hearings on the issues of conflicts of interest in medicine and research.

And that was brought up again in the 80s with Senator Gore, and it appeared again in the 20s. 2000s with Senator Grassley. There have been a number of kind of watershed moments in the history of conflicts of interest, but I think the big ones are the growing recognition by universities and medical schools, that this was something that they needed to tackle. A second watershed moment was obviously the requirements by journals that people disclose, when we know they don't always do it, but they're required to.

And then finally was the Physician Payment Sunshine Act and the requirement that drug companies disclose to the American people how much they pay physicians related to marketing and research and so on. Those are really the big things. And what's happened is the frequency of relationships has declined over that time, in part due to the increased transparency, I think, and in part due to institutional policies at medical schools, teaching hospitals and all. also at the American Medical Association, that attempted to limit what people consider to be inappropriate relationships. We're talking about medical research and conflicts of interest, and if you want to join us 844-8255 or 844-Sight-Tock, we have a call here from Jim, who's calling from New Haven, Connecticut. Hello there, Jim. You're on Science Friday. Hi, thanks for taking my call.

I guess the only person who made the last call made the point I wanted to make. So I actually am a physician. I also have an academic appointment, and I work in Big Pharma. And what I wanted to point out is the pharmaceutical company has very stringent obligations in terms of legal requirements that our attorneys make us report every single nickel we give to a physician under any circumstance. And I can tell you within Farmer, the lawyers are all over this in terms of oversight and make sure we do that. So you say within the pharmaceutical industry, Jim, the lawyers are making sure you do this. Do you hear some of what Katie and Eric are talking about, though, that non-disclosure to journals is a big problem in your field?

Jim? Maybe Jim has left us. Katie, I'm wondering if you can maybe pick up on what Jim said. I mean, he's saying that pharma is policing itself as far as making sure that people who work on both sides of this fence are disclosing as much as possible. Right. And, you know, as I mentioned, and Eric did as well, there's the open payments system, which is a relatively new federal database. where the drug companies are required to report their payments to physicians. But one thing that came up in our reporting was a pretty big gap,

especially in the area of cancer research, but a lot of other areas of research as well, which is that a lot of these doctors are doing work with startups that don't have any approved products yet. So they're doing early research, sometimes clinical studies, everything that you would need to do to get a drug to market, but they don't have those reporting requirements before they haven't approved a drug.

So there's a whole host of companies, you know, and that don't have to report this. And that's where, when I mentioned that there was some additional digging required, that's what I was talking about, is there's, you know, dozens of companies out there that are startups and that are putting drugs on the market, but they don't have to report this. Eric, I think it's probably important to take a step back a little bit.

and really explain why this matters to people. I mean, what is the problem of conflict of interest of the type that you and Katie are talking about to people who go to the doctor, people who are worried about the medical system? Sure. So for physicians, the primary interest of physicians is the health and welfare of their patients. And secondary interests like making money or getting free dinners or being a consultant with drug company have the potential to change what doctors do. And the behavior that these relationships change is it changes their prescribing behaviors. It's associated with a change in prescribing behaviors.

Research has been done tons of it, a pile of research so big if it fell on you, it would kill you, to show that, in fact, gifts from drug companies to doctors are associated with increased prescribing of that company's products and services. Research in the opioid industry in opiates has shown just this week that, in fact, what matters is not really how much money doctors get paid, but the number of gifts and payments they get. And what happens is that when doctors get paid by companies, for example, that sell opioids, they increase the prescribing of opioids. And this research that just came out is fantastic because it then looked at regional differences in rates of overdose. from opioids and found that it was associated. And that's the real key here is that doctors, financial conflicts of interest can influence the drugs and devices that patients get, and that can have important health consequences for the patient. I'm John Dankosky, and this is

Science Friday from WNYC Studios. And Eric Campbell, I'd like to continue on that, especially because the opioid epidemic in America is such a big concern to so many people. You're saying that this most recent study looks at the places where opioids are the biggest problem. You're seeing doctors who are actually overprescribing in those places. And it is fascinating that it's not about people taking hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's about people just getting some free meals. Right. That's the marketing industry and the drug industry has known for years that small gifts can be very influential in influencing what people do.

And it can occur below the consciousness of. people because it builds reciprocity and many doctors deny that these have an effect on what they do in fact one of the interesting things that I always do is I ask doctors if getting a gift influences what they do and very few doctors say it influences what they do but when you ask them if it influences their colleagues like 80% of them say oh yes it totally influences my colleagues it's kind of a self-deception if you will about the effects and how powerful small gifts and food are on what people do.

I'm wondering, Katie, if you can connect some of what Eric's talking about with some of your reporting, the prescribing of, say, opioids at the doctor-to-patient level with the types of conflicts that you're reporting on, big research universities working with pharma, maybe not talking as much about as they should, make a connection for our listeners so that they understand why this is such a big problem in their lives. Right. And, you know, I should say that in the stories that we did especially, we did a broader story looking beyond Dr. Bessalga and that other researchers who failed to disclose, we were not reporting that their research was biased or skewed necessarily. But it does raise the question. There's like Eric was saying this question of reciprocity and unconscious bias, unconsciously, you know, allowing these relationships. to infiltrate your research that people have raised with us as potential concerns.

You know, there are also studies out there. Eric will be more familiar with them than me, but that show that the, you know, that research that's done by industry, funded by industry, tends to be more positive than research that's not, for example. Eric, could you quickly pick up on that, if you would? We just have a little less than a minute before the break. Sure. There's actually a fairly decent body of literature to show that studies that are,

funded by drug companies are significantly more likely when they're published to present results that are both positive regarding the safety and efficacy of a company's products and services than they are if those studies are not funded by industry. And there's a lot of reasons, potential reasons why that is, but it has been shown over and over and over again. Eric Campbell is a professor of medicine and director of research at the University of Colorado Center for Bioethics and Humanities. And Katie Thomas is a reporter for the New York Times who's been covering the business of health care and also covering conflicts of interest in research.

After the break, we're going to talk more about this issue and get to some of your questions as well. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski. We're talking about medical professionals who don't disclose their conflicts of interest in scientific journals. My guests are Katie Thomas, a reporter for the New York Times who's been working on stories about this with ProPublica.

Eric Campbell is a professor of medicine and director of research at the University. University of Colorado's Center for Bioethics and Humanities. I want to get some of your phone calls in here as well. Robert is calling from Cleveland, Ohio. Hello there, Robert. You're on Science Friday. Hello. You know, for all of the reasons that you've brought up on your program today,

I don't think there should be any money going for pharmaceutical companies to doctors. About five and a half years ago, I was, oh, about 60 to 70 percent crippled by, an antibiotic. I don't know if most people know this, but if you took a generic drug, you have no legal rights, you can't sue. My many consultations with doctors

and other people that have been affected by this antibiotic since that time has shown me that the doctors do not, they do not pay much attention to what the patient says. They listen to the pharmaceutical Rep. Well, Robert, thank you very much for your phone call. I'm sorry. I think we lost you there. I'd like to ask Eric to maybe follow up on this. What Robert just told us is something that an awful lot of people in America feel right now is that if they read a story by Katie Thomas in the New York Times that says that researchers or doctors are getting big money from pharma, then they're not going to listen to the patient. They're going to listen to the person who's making the antibiotic or making the cancer drug or making the opioid. Well, you know, there's actually some data on this.

My colleagues and I surveyed doctors about how often they use generics compared to brand-name drugs to treat some diseases. And what we found is that the doctors were more likely to say they use brand-name drugs if they had been visited by drug companies and if they'd accepted meals. And the reason is that drug companies in general don't market generics. They market high-price brand-name drugs. I would disagree with the caller somewhat is I don't think we should sever all relationships with doctors and researchers because, in fact, contracts and research grants and contracts are the fundamental mechanism by which we have the drugs and the good devices that exist in medicine today. So I would be more circumsend and suggesting that perhaps practicing physicians should not be allowed to take things like meals in their offices. They shouldn't allow to, you know, go to tickets and attend the Super Bowl or go to Florida and take their family to Disney World. But that research relationships are really in a different class.

And for physicians who do research, allowing them to have principled relationships in the scope of a research is really an important concept. So, Katie, what are some things that you think could make this system better? Now that you've been studying this and reporting on it for a while. I mean, what are some of the things that are missing here that maybe through some oversight or maybe just through more information could help us understand a little bit better and avoid these conflicts? Sure. Some of the things that people have pointed out to us, the first one is consistency from the medical journals. We heard from a lot of researchers who were very frustrated that, you know, different journals have different rules. You know, some go back two years, some go back three years. They have different rules about what's considered relevant.

And so some sort of streamlining, a better streamlining of what their rules are for disclosure across these journals would be good. And then also, you know, others have pointed out some way for reporting from these smaller companies, these startups. And then just going along with the idea of streamlining this, there's been a push for a more centralized way of reporting these conflicts. Again, the open payments database is one big source of information, but it's not everything. And the New England Journal of Medicine is actually developing some sort of a system like this with the AEMC, the American Association of Medical Colleges, which would have researchers put all of their conflicts into one central place. And that might help with kind of automatic, you know, more clear disclosure. And Eric, do you have some thoughts on this quickly?

Things that we could do better? Yeah, I think the medical, the research community could potentially just embrace the fact that why don't folks just disclose everything that they have. In other words, not systematically pick and choose what is relevant or not, but make a database in which researchers, conflicts of interest are widely available, and then journal editors can look them up and the reviewers can look them up and so on. The other thing I think is that I still think we need to do a better job about helping researchers understand why it's so important to both trust in science and trust in our academic institutions to make sure that they personally are vigilant in doing it. Because at the end of the day, I think the last thing any researcher wants is to be on the other end of a story by Katie Thomas about conflicts of interest.

Yeah, and the idea of making sure that we actually have confidence in this entire system is probably something, Eric, that's really important to you, that we trust the researchers, that we trust our doctors. Right, I think the profession of medicine when it's studied is consistently one of the most highly regarded fields in that people in which people work. And I think it's essential to maintain that trust for a profession, but also for the people. that the profession serves, and because trust is a really important concept in medicine. Eric Campbell is a professor of medicine and director of research at the University of Colorado Center for Bioethics and Humanities. Eric, thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate it. Thank you, John. Also, thanks to Katie Thomas, a journalist at the New York Times. Thank you for all your great work, Katie. I really do appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. We've got someone on the line here now. Science Friday's own education director, Ariel Zitch, has been in Antarctica, and today she managed to get a hold of a Saturday. satellite phone, and she's calling us up from a penguin colony. Ariel, are you there? Can you hear us? I am. I can hear you loud and clear, John. Thanks so much for calling into the show. I guess I should ask you. First of all, where are you exactly? Well, so I'm in Antarctica. As you mentioned, I'm a 45-minute helicopter flight outside of McMurdo's station, and I'm here at Cape Royd's Penguin Colony, which is a colony of about 2,500 nesting Adelie Penguins. And what are you doing there? What are they doing with the

Penguins. This time of year, the special time of year for penguin researchers. It's right before the chicks of the year fledge and start foraging on their own. And it's our last chance to get a full count and wait on the chicks of the colony and do penguin banding. So they've got little flipper tags. And those tags are what researchers here with Dr. David Amley's group are using to track their return rate. So the likelihood they'll return after a couple of years as juveniles and come back. made.

Could you? It's fun. I'm wondering if you could describe the scene for us, because what I'm imagining is these lines of little penguins very orderly waiting to be, to be banded. What does it look like? Describe how many penguins we're talking about here. Well, it's nothing like order. I can tell you that, because it's more like chaos.

The penguins right now are really fluffy, so the chicks are very fluffy. They're about as tall as their parents. They're still very closely attached. And what they do is because they stick very close to the nest in these colonies where they're safe from scruff. attack, this is a predatory seabird here, they stick really close to these nests, so they kind of just approach them slowly with a fence until they fenced them in and then close the fence around them, and then they pull all the adults out, and you can't imagine the bolt the smell and the amount

of fluff that goes on because these birds are actively molting, so there's just penguin down floating everywhere and quite a bit of poop. But I think, I mean, it's actually, it's amazing how efficient these researchers are. It's clear that they do this a lot. They've got some really interesting new things they're looking at. They're interested in the virology of these penguins, so they're taking some samples for that. And they've got, you know, some really interesting stories to tell, too, about climate change because they've been doing this process for so long with a few colonies here to Antarctica,

they've got a really clear picture of how these populations are changing with things like sea ice. So it's, you know, it's quite the effort, but the great penguin corral is doing its job. What's the weather like there today? It's beautiful. There's a light breeze. It's maybe 17 Fahrenheit out. You know, I'm not even wearing big red today. Big red is a large red down coat that's kind of like a sleeping bag you wear.

We don't even need it on a day like today. You know, sunglasses and sunscreen are really indicated because of the sun is so bright here. But it's, you know, we have a hot breakfast at the station. We put on our boots and our extreme weather gear for. for the helicopter flight. And then by the time we get to this colony, we're cooking and so we strip down and get in our proper field equipment, which is, you know, just hiking boots, warm pants, a fleece, it's not much more than that. It's really pretty accessible. Well, before I let you go, Ariel, I have to say there's an iconic picture of Iroflato

holding up a microphone to a penguin in Antarctica. I'm wondering, are you going to do that? Are you going to record some penguins for us? Record some penguins. It's going to look a little bit more like a camera. And in this case, It looks like me holding a sat phone up to the penguins. We'll see if you guys can hear them on the way out. But, yeah, I'll do my best. I'll do my best. Okay, well, I'll let you go.

If you're near enough penguins, maybe you can hold the microphone up to one and see if we can hear one. You got it. I'll do my best job. Thanks a lot. Okay, thanks so much. Ariel Zitch is the education director for Science Friday. She's been joining us from the bottom of the world in Antarctica.

Well, maybe we can hear some penguins there in the background. That's very cool. Thanks for joining us, Ariel. Thanks a lot, John. Have a good one. We're going to finish it with a fascinating story. Remember last year's arrest of the Golden State Killer? The case drew lots of attention for its clever use of consumer genetic testing websites to catch the killer

and for all the murky, ethical questions that came with it. But it wasn't the first time the law enforcement had used this technique to solve a cold case. Detectives looking for the Golden State Killer took their inspiration from an earlier case in New Hampshire, known as the Bear Brook murders. In that case, police were up against an unknown killer and identity. unidentified victims until they relied on a genealogy database called Jedmatch to help them with a break in the case. It was a strategy that would change the game for forensic investigations and cold case murders, and it's also the basis of an excellent new true crime podcast from New Hampshire Public Radio called Bear Brook. With us now to talk about it as New Hampshire Public Radio

reporter and host of the podcast, Jason Moon. Welcome to the show, Jason. Hey, John, happy to be here. Maybe you can just very quickly tell us about this story, because I know it's a very convoluted story, but this case that you started following and some of the twists and turns that take us to the science. Yeah, it is. It's a very sprawling case that literally spans the country and more than three decades. But one way to get into it is to think about it as beginning with one missing person's case. So a woman of the name of Lisa growing up in Southern California thought for years that she had been abandoned by her father at a young age. but because of an unrelated murder case that happened while she was in her 20s,

she and police found out that that person wasn't actually her father. So you had a situation where she and police had a kidnapping case that was sort of decades old, but now they had the questions of who was she and where did she come from and what was her real name and who was her real family. And so the quest to answer those questions, in a strange, meandering way, led all the way back to New Hampshire and to some other mysteries along the way. I'm John Dankosky. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. And we're talking with Jason Moon, the host of the Bear Brook podcast. So Lisa, this missing person, suggested to law enforcement that they use genetic testing websites, the kind that anybody can use.

Maybe you can explain the process, though, that police go through for genetic testing and genealogy. to identify someone. Yes. So one thing that's really important to understand is that if you have your DNA on, say, Ancestry.com or 23 and Me, police don't have access to that. They can't just go and look around and try to find suspects. So what happened was there is another website called Jedmatch that is sort of a, it's a nonprofit, you know, sort of built by two guys down in Florida who were just genealogy. enthusiasts, and it allows for more sharing of the genetic information, and people will turn to Jedmatch to run more advanced searches on their DNA to look for distant cousins and

the like, and also because it allows you to compare tests from the different companies. So if I tested on 23 and me and you, John, tested on Ancestry.com, instead of one of us having to buy another kit and spit into a tube and wait a couple weeks to get our results to compare each other, we could just take our data to jedmatch. And this was a really powerful tool for genealogists who wanted to build family trees. But then people started using it in adoption searches, finding out, well, who were my, you know, adopted or my biological parents if I was adopted. And then finally, it started to get used in law enforcement to find missing persons, which was what happened with Lisa. And then later they started to identify suspects with this

technique and, you know, the most famous of which being the Golden State Killer suspect. And as I suggested, what's kind of creepy about this is, is if I put up my information, I'm really putting up information about my entire family, my entire family tree for law enforcement and everyone to search through. Yeah. I mean, if you put your data in Jedmatch, that it certainly is a possibility. And it's one of the things that's so fascinating to me about this whole subject is that, you know, our genetic information, information is not only extremely personal about us and it has so much data about us as individuals and can be used to identify us, but it's also this shared data set in a sense, you know, because it in a way that unlike fingerprints, say, where each person has just an individual set of fingerprints, and that's that, with DNA, with the tests that they've developed over the last several years, your DNA is not only a marker to, that points to you, but it also points to your family that, you know, and not just your immediate

family, but, you know, up to fifth or sixth cousins and, you know, generation, hundreds of years back in time. So it really is a strange new space that we're figuring out how to navigate. And people are navigating it who are amateurs, people who aren't professional investigators, they helped to solve some of the big mysteries that you were looking at in this Bearbrook case, Jason. That's right. So these were these folks like Barbara Ray Venner, who we talked to in the podcast, you know, they got started doing these adoption searches where people wanted to find out who their biological dad was, who their biological mom was, and they would use genetic genealogy to find a distant cousin of the person who had contacted

them, and then they would follow the family tree back to find out who their parent was. And then now they're just using that same basic technique to find criminal suspects by taking, you know, DNA samples from crime scenes, finding a distant cousin of that crime scene sample, and then following the family trees and narrowing down to who could have possibly, you know, belonged to that DNA sample. There are so many twists and turns in this story. Jason Moon is a reporter for New Hampshire Public Radio host of the excellent Bear Brook podcast, and you can find out all about this. I would check it out anywhere you find your podcast. Jason, thanks so much for joining us, and congratulations on the work. Thanks so much for having me. BJ Leederman composed our theme music, and if you missed any part of this program or you'd like to hear it again, you can subscribe to our podcast. You can also ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Say hi to us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or email us.

The address is SciFri at ScienceFri.com. Send feedback. Tell us what you like to cover, too. In New York, I'm John Dankoski.