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Template:Did you know nominations/Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories

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The following discussion is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by BlueMoonset (talk) 04:35, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories edit

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Created/expanded by CMBJ (talk). Self nom at 23:16, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

  • Article is new enough and long enough. I see only two DYKs in the user's history, so QPQ is not required.
I added Dioxinfreak to the DYKmake credits as a second major contributor to the article, but I find that the "PCB cancer studies" section contributed by this user is copied from this source. That information is a valuable part of the article, but it must not be copied from a source.
The "History" section of the article includes some short paragraphs and other statements that cry out in need of footnotes. That needs to be resolved before this can be used in DYK.
The hook (after I changed the preposition "for" to "in" in both article and hook) is supported by references 2 (Zhou) and 4 (Cook). However, I am disturbed to see that one of those two sources apparently plagiarized the other, as the text I've looked at is identical between those sources. Also, I find this hook far less interesting than I would a hook that said that this lab conducted more than one-third of all toxicological testing before it was discovered to have engaged in extensive scientific misconduct. So here it is:
Bottom line: There are possibilities here, but the article needs less plagiarism (zero plagiarism, to be specific) and more footnotes before it can be featured on the main page. Also, I'd feel more comfortable if it didn't cite whichever of those two sources plagiarized the other one. --Orlady (talk) 03:30, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
CMBJ has been making progress on the article, which is on my watchlist. I've removed Dioxinfreak from the credits here. --Orlady (talk) 16:38, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
Belatedly following up regarding the above:
(1) The hook's preposition was intentional at the time, but I've since seen sufficient evidence to say that it's reasonably safe to go with the latter form.
(2) Zhou does appear to have directly plagiarized Cook, so I have removed that source from the article.
(3) Dioxinfreak's edits should not be an issue — see here.
I've got a couple more improvements in mind before this goes live on DYK, so (someone) give me a holler before posting it up. Also, below is an updated blurb that reflects the accidental nature of IBT's initial brush with the FDA, which is certainly an interesting detail.   — C M B J   13:09, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
  • An impressive amount of work has been done here! I've done a partial review of the revisions.
That ALT2 hook is interesting. However, I have doubts about the quality of support for the assertion that the discovery was an accident. Two sources are cited; a news piece in Science and an editorial in the New York Times. In my reading of the Science piece, I find no support for the notion that the discovery was an "accident". The New York Times source does contain the information that Gross was looking for some other file, but this is an editorial-page item that mentions the factual situation almost in passing, and is not clear what the basis for the factual assertion is. Moreover, the assertion that the discovery was accidental seems to me to diminish the quality of the FDA staff's investigative work. Perhaps the investigator was looking for some other file when he initially opened the IBT file, but he had to have spent a lot of time scrutinizing the contents of the IBT file (why would he do that if opening the file was totally accidental?) in order to see the oddities that caused him to form a suspicion of fraud. We can't feature a hook fact that is supported only by a newspaper editorial, particularly when the article cites numerous other sources with a more factual focus.
Regarding Dioxinfreak's input: He may have written the series in Amicus Journal, but the presumptive copyright owner is the NRDC (publisher of Amicus) and Wikipedia would need WP:OTRS documentation from NRDC granting a free license to the content. Considering the nonencyclopedic tone of the Amicus piece, the perception of NRDC as an entity with nonneutral POV, and Wikipedia's general preference for truly original content, rewriting the portion based on that source still seems more straightforward than attempting to defend inclusion of text from the source. The series in Amicus Journal is a valuable set of sources for this article, but I think it is better to treat them as cited references than as content to copy into the article verbatim.
I'm going to convert the boxed/quoted information in the "1954–1965: Early years" section into standard Wikipedia prose. Content published by the United States National Academies is copyright to them (these are not US government agencies whose work is public domain) and anyway the directory entry is factual information, not the kind of content for which value is added by direct quotation. --Orlady (talk) 19:33, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
I certainly didn't intend the ALT2 hook to cast Gross' investigative work in a negative light in any way whatsoever; it's just fascinating to think that one of the greatest scandals in modern history might have never occurred, if not for something so benign and mundane as someone simply pulling out the wrong file. I think there's a high degree of certainty that we could get OTRS documentation for the Amicus material, but I agree with you in that the content would best be rewritten to suit the encyclopedic context and I'll follow up with Dioxinfreak accordingly. As for reiteration of the NRC's entry, I personally thought it to be in such a murky gray area that verbatim presentation would be best, but it's fine with me either way.   — C M B J   23:27, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
An update:
  • "The problem was discovered only by accident, when a Government official looking for something else pulled out a file of IBT data by mistake." [Original source, NYT]
  • "IBT's trouble began in earnest in 1976 when a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pathologist named Adrian Gross conducted random spot checks on recent testing reports submitted to the agency. By chance, Gross' assistant brought him a Syntex Corporation study that had been conducted under contract by IBT." ["Poisoned Research". Mother Jones 7 (5): 40.]
  • "The story of how the IBT scandal was discovered is interesting. According to Science magazine, “in 1975, Food & Drug Administration officials received a tip from an employee of Syntex Corp., a drug manufacturer in California, that there were problems with tests that Syntex had submitted to the FDA. An FDA official, instead of pulling a file on Syntex, pulled one by mistake on Industrial Bio-Test, an independent laboratory that had done a study for Syntex on an antiarthritic drug called Naprosyn. On reading it, he found enough deficiencies to warrant an inspection...”" [As Luck Would Have It ... ," R. Jeffrey Smith, Science 198:1228, Dec. 23, 1977. via NCAP News 3(3)]
  • "Federal investigators discovered it by accident." [Inman, William (1984-02-19). "Agents stumble onto massive fraud". The Salina Journal: pp. 21.]
  — C M B J   14:57, 5 August 2012 (UTC)
  • Sorry, but the more I look at these and other sources, the more I am convinced that there is no basis for DYK to state, as a supported fact, that the discovery of fraud was "accidental". Considering these four sources:
  • I discount the use of the word "accident" in the New York Times editorial and the Salina Journal sources as an editor or reporter choosing a word to summarize/simplify information obtained from a secondary source.
  • The most common version of the details of what happened (for example, in both Mother Jones and the Salina Journal) indicates that Gross was conducting a spot check of a random sample of data sets in FDA files, and that a file on IBT testing of naprosyn was one of the files included ("by chance") as part of the random sample. The act of spot-checking data and the use of random sampling methods are standard practices (although criticized by those who think the FDA ought to scrutinize all submitted data), and if IBT was doing one-third of the tests submitted to IBT, there's a high probability that at least one IBT study would be selected "by chance". Calling the "by chance" selection of an IBT file an "accident" (as done by the NYT and Salina Journal) strikes me as a misunderstanding by journalists without any scientific background (something few journalists have).
  • The quotation from the Science article (which article was, by the way, a news piece and not a peer-reviewed scientific paper) is hard to make sense of. As a more contemporary account and in a venue that tends to understand scientific topics, it ought to be the most reliable of these reports. However, the story of how the file was selected is inconsistent with other versions (which describe the random-checking process and give the date of the discovery as 1976, not 1975) -- and it doesn't make complete sense for other reasons. Regarding those "other reasons", if Gross was pursuing test data submitted by Syntex, it would make perfect sense for him to check files for studies that independent labs (such as IBT) had conducted for -- and subsequently submitted by -- Syntex.
The ALT1 hook is fully supported by sources -- and ought to be shocking enough by itself. There is no need to stretch it by adding an assertion that is not so clearly supportable. --Orlady (talk) 17:13, 5 August 2012 (UTC)
  • I'll pass this with ALT1 ON ONE CONDITION: that Orlady, who can't pass something with their own hook in it, OKs the article as a whole (specifically, zero plagiarism). I've left Orlady a note asking them to revisit this nomination and comment on it. BTW, Orlady, thank you for your diligence. Drmies (talk) 04:23, 18 August 2012 (UTC)
Additionally, I continue to be concerned about the article's focus on the anecdotal report that Adrian Gross reviewed the IBT files by accident. At best, that's undue emphasis on a relatively minor detail in the story, but I think it's fundamentally erroneous. This Amicus Journal piece says, "Several writers have described the event as a matter of chance, but that is only part of the story. Nine months earlier, Senator Edward M. Kennedy began the first series of historic and sensational hearings on Capitol Hill in which it was publicly disclosed that scientific research being conducted by the nation's drug industry was being deliberately falsified. The following January, officials of the EPA admitted that they were finding evidence of the same kind of shoddy scientific research in their files. It was in this atmosphere that Gross initiated a program of random spot checks of recent testing reports submitted by manufacturers to the FDA. One of the reports pulled from the files was IBT's Naprosyn study." Regardless of why he picked up the particular file, if IBT was doing 35-40% of the toxicology studies submitted, sooner or later he would have picked up one of their studies. --Orlady (talk) 13:20, 18 August 2012 (UTC)
Reopening this one. The only thing that was holding it up was a long passage of copyvio content that I was waiting (in vain, it seems) for the article creator to rewrite. I've deleted the problem passage. The article is clean now. This is good to go. --Orlady (talk) 02:11, 22 August 2012 (UTC)
(Discussion continued at User talk:Orlady#DYK/IBT).   — C M B J   08:40, 24 August 2012 (UTC)
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