Dear All,

In the last email I shared with you the pathetic, some would say insulting, response that  Dr. Margaret Dale of the Harvard Medical School sent to Dr. Albert Burgstahler and others.

Today, Albert has mailed a second letter to President Bok (see below) and I hope everyone who receives this bulletin will take just a few moments to send a very short message to President Bok asking him to respond to Albert’s letter.

Please copy your letter to his wife Sissela Bok who has written several books pertaining to honesty in academic and public life. She should be able to confirm that Professor Chester Douglass grossly violated the principles of academic integrity in his communications with both the NRC and the NIEHS (see the pdf file of the one page letter Douglass sent to NRC at http://www.ewg.org/issues_content/fluoride/20050627/pdf/NIEHS_final_report.pdf).

Please send this message (or your own modified version) to President Bok.

Please put any title or credentials after your name, and indicate the town, state and country from where you come. Bok’s email address, subject heading, cc and bcc details for your email are listed above.

Please get your friends and colleagues to do the same. We need to get as many of these support letters in as soon as possible before the Harvard people think this issue has been settled.

Paul Connett

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1620 Massachusetts Street

Lawrence, KS 66044

awburg@ku.edu

September 10, 2006

Derek Bok
President, Harvard University
Office of the President
Massachusetts Hall
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138

Dear President Bok:

I am writing directly to you because Dean Margaret L. Dale’s September 7, 2006 reply (copy enclosed/attached) to the joint letter a group of Harvard alumni and I sent to you on August 22, 2006 (copy also enclosed/attached) did not address the central issue raised in our letter concerning Harvard’s brief August 15, 2006 statement exonerating Professor Chester Douglass of any academic misconduct.

 In essence Dean Dale simply reaffirmed the August 15 statement without providing any explanation for Professor Douglass first having “hid, then misrepresented, his graduate student’s PhD dissertation, which found a ‘robust’ association between fluoridated water and an increased risk of osteosarcoma in young boys, a frequently fatal disease.”

What was submitted by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) to Harvard for investigation showed that after the above dissertation submitted by Elise Bassin had been approved and her PhD degree granted in 2001, Professor Douglass made public statements categorically claiming his research did not find any evidence for a significant association between water fluoridation and osteosarcoma. In his one-page 2004 written statement to the National Research Council panel investigating evidence for this association, he cited Dr. Bassin’s dissertation as a reference but did not state that the “robust association” reported in it contradicted what he presented in his statement.

 Similarly, in his final report on his grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) to investigate the epidemiology of osteosarcoma, he again cited Dr. Bassin’s dissertation without noting that its findings did not support his claim of no significant association between water fluoridation and the incidence of osteosarcoma.

To be precise, in his report to both the NRC and the NIEHS, Professor Douglass gave an “Odds Ratio of 1.2 to 1.4 between fluoride and osteosarcopma that was not significantly different from 1,” but he cited Elise Bassin’s dissertation as a reference without indicating that she had found a five- to seven-fold increased risk for osteosarcoma in young boys exposed to fluoridated water in their 6th, 7th, and 8th years. (A pdf file of Professor Douglass’s one-page communication to the NRC is available at http://www.ewg.org/issues_content/fluoride/200506227/pdf/NIEHS_final_report.pdf.)

This conduct by Professor Douglass is what is at the heart of our concern, not whether fluoridation is safe or not. In scientific research, honest scholarship requires that any cited reference that does not agree with the position of the author(s) be openly identified as such. By failing to do this, Professor Douglass clearly misled his readers and committed a serious breach of scientific trust and integrity. Dean Dale’s letter did not provide any explanation for why the Harvard review committee concluded that Professor Douglass had not committed research misconduct by acting in the manner he did, which is the reason for our inquiry.

In concluding her letter to me, Dean Dale stated: “. . . Harvard stands behind its faculty review processes, which are thorough and fair and which apply to all [members of the] faculty, regardless of public interest in the matter.”  If this is the case, then a satisfactory explanation for why the review committee did not find that any research misconduct had been committed should be forthcoming.

Without such an explanation for dismissing the evidence of misconduct by Professor Douglass, how can one conclude that Harvard is abiding by its commitment to uphold academic integrity?

For the sake of living up to its exalted motto “Veritas,” Harvard University would indeed do well to heed what an author well known to you wrote: “Trust and integrity are precious resources, easily squandered, hard to regain. They can survive only on a foundation of respect for veracity.” (Sisella Bok: Lying - Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, Pantheon Books, New York, page 249)

        Sincerely,

            Albert W. Burgstahler, PhD, ‘53                                                     
      Professor Emeritus of Chemistry
The University of Kansas
        Lawrence, KS 66045

Copy: Co-signers of August 22, 2006 letter to you    
Copy: Sept. 7, 2006 letter to me from Margaret L. Dale, Dean for Faculty and Research Integrity, Harvard Medical School

Copy: August 22, 2006 letter from Albert W. Burgstahler and Harvard alumni to Derek Bok, President of Harvard University

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