Author of Disputed Columbia U. Study on Pregnancy and Prayer Pleads Guilty to Fraud Charges By LILA GUTERMAN
Doctors were shocked in 2001 to read a study from Columbia University that found that praying for women seeking to become pregnant could double their chances of success using in vitro fertilization. Some doctors were even more shocked that the study, which they considered highly flawed, had been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Now comes the final surprise: One of the paper's three authors pleaded guilty last month to two federal charges of fraud.
Daniel P. Wirth, a lawyer and researcher into the supernatural, was accused of conspiring with another man to defraud several banks, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and Adelphia Communications, a cable-television company. According to the charges, the two men bilked Adelphia of $2.1-million. They pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit mail fraud and bank fraud. Both men will face as much as five years in federal prison and $250,000 in fines when they are sentenced, in September. They have agreed to forfeit more than $1-million seized during an investigation of the case.
Mr. Wirth was one of three authors of an October 2001 paper in The Journal of Reproductive Medicine. The other two were Kwang Y. Cha, who is now scientific director of a fertility clinic in Los Angeles, and Rogerio A. Lobo, chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons and a member of the editorial board of the reproductive-medicine journal. Neither Dr. Cha nor Dr. Lobo responded to requests for comment on Monday.
Dr. Lobo's secretary, Reba Nosoff, described Dr. Cha as a visiting professor and said he had completed the study without Dr. Lobo's help.
In the study, Americans, Australians, and Canadians prayed for women in South Korea who were unaware that they were part of an experiment. Dr. Cha, said Ms. Nosoff, "brought this study to Dr. Lobo to go over because he could hardly believe the results. Dr. Lobo said it's a good study, and it is proper. So he put his stamp of approval on it, that's all."
Ms. Nosoff's account largely squares with one given in a December 2001 letter to Columbia's vice president for health sciences from an official at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Human Research Protections. The office had apparently investigated the Columbia study because the human subjects had not been informed of their participation. The research-protections office said in the letter that it would not take action against Columbia in part because Dr. Lobo "first learned of the study from Dr. Cha 6-12 months after the study was completed. Dr. Lobo primarily provided editorial review and assistance with publication."
But there were other problems with the paper, said Bruce L. Flamm, a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California at Irvine. The study bore "bewildering" methodological flaws, he said on Monday. Instead of merely having a group of people pray for the women attempting to get pregnant, the study had one group doing that, a second group praying to help the first group, and a third group praying that "God's will or desire be fulfilled for the prayer participants" in the first two groups.
"I couldn't believe it had been accepted [for publication] based on that fact alone," said Dr. Flamm.
He said he had written several letters to the editor of the journal detailing his views but received no response. The paper retained its published status until Dr. Flamm wrote an article, which appeared in Skeptic magazine late last month, that revealed the paper's connection to the fraud case.
Since then, the journal has removed the paper from its Web site. In a short interview on Monday, Lawrence D. Devoe, one of the journal's two editors in chief, declined to explain whether the paper had been officially retracted. "We are well aware of the issues concerning that paper," he said, "and all further comment will be handled in the text of the journal itself. The paper is being scrutinized, and there will be a statement that will appear in a forthcoming issue."
Dr. Flamm said Dr. Lobo had been "very well respected" before the paper came out, so "how he got hooked into this is a mystery."
Dr. Flamm is also mystified about the journal editors' lack of response to his and other doctors' letters and inquiries. "Within two weeks after that article was published, I said, 'You've got a big problem,'" he told The Chronicle. "They ignored all the red flags. They ignored all the warnings."