Follow up to the Oslo fabrication. Dr. Sudbø is not in hiding, but he is “on sick leave” and cannot be reached. His wife and his twin brother, who are both scientists, worked with him on the The Lancet study, according to the Guardian, but were unaware of his fraud.

No way of knowing as yet if any statements about the effect of NSAIDs on oral cancer in his article are true. It’s plain though that Dr. Sudbø assembled no genuine evidence for anything that he claimed in this study. He created a simulated reality, a database of pretend patients.

“He faked everything: names, diagnosis, gender, weight, age, drug use,” Stein Vaaler, director of strategy at Oslo’s Radium hospital, said. “There is no real data whatsoever, just figures he made up himself. Every patient in this paper is a fake.

“He was an outstanding scientist in our hospital. I feel shocked and depressed. We could not believe what happened or why he did it,” the Guardian reports.

Dr. Sudbø’s name appears on 38 or more other studies including two published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Investigators at his hospital are looking into why he he faked the study in The Lancet and whether others are fake.

Reports on NSAIDs and cancer prevention from other research labs are not implicated, as far as we know, in his fraud. (It may even turn out that he “copied” or made a pastiche of genuine results while faking the evidence for his own right to assert his claims.) However, researchers from other leading institutions worked with him and signed off on the fake study — namely, J. Jack Lee and Scott M. Lippman, UT M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas; Andrew J. Dannenberg, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York, N.Y.; Simone Sagen, Wanja Kildal, and Albrecht Reith, The Norwegian Radium Hospital, Oslo, Norway; Jon Mork, The National Hospital, Oslo, Norway; Ari Ristimaki, Helsinki University Central Hospital, Helsinki, Finland; and Asle Sudbo, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway.

Further, one Cox-2 inhibitor in particular, Vioxx, is in the spotlight for allegedly bypassing sloppy oversight and causing patient deaths (See “FDA failed public on Vioxx, scientist says” MSNBC Nov. 19, 2004).

While Dr. Sudbo’s colleagues are calling this a “personal tragedy” for him, obviously it is even more a blow for cancer patients Two or three blows, really:

Will Dr. Sudbo’s patients have any say in whether they wish him to continue to treat them? Anyway you look at it, they’ve lost their doctor’s reliability.

The scandal came to light, according to the Guardian, “when the Norwegian prime minister’s sister read the article at Christmas. Camilla Stoltenberg, who works at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, noticed claims that Dr Sudboe had gathered information from a national database. But the database in question had not been open until now.”