@jon-nyc said in How can this woman retain her Medical License?:
But normally - indeed almost always - the failure to publish isn’t for nefarious reasons at all. The researcher can’t get an interesting result, knows no decent journal will publish her negative result, and gives up. Or they run into some problem they didn’t anticipate, the current funding they’ve secured won’t let them surmount it, and they sorta give up. Or maybe they give up after being unsuccessful in a follow up grant application. IOW the non-publication is usually out of the investigator’s control ergo can’t be mandated.
The book "Bullshit" talks about that. No one wants to read a paper that has no results.
what I described is very different than what happened in this case
But as you say, showing a negative effect of a treatment should be high up on the ethics scale when it comes to medical, if not all, scientific publication.
When you show that thalidomide causes phocomelia and you decide to not publish those results, there's something seriously wrong with you.
