[Ed. In response to a request from The Epidemiology Monitor, the Dean of University of California Berkeley School of Public Health provided the following statement of its position in response to the report on Patricia Buffler by The Center for Public Integrity. The statement is published here in its entirety.]

A story published last month suggested that research conducted by Dr. Patricia Buffler, a recently deceased professor and former dean of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, might have been influenced by her association with private industry.

The story focused primarily on Dr. Buffler’s work as a consultant and litigation expert for private industry. Since Dr. Buffler’s consulting work took place outside the University and was completely separate from her academic activities, we are not in a position to know if the allegations are true, and sadly, she is no longer here to address these questions.

What is indisputable is that Dr. Buffler spent her academic career researching and publishing about the dangers of environmental toxins for adults and children. Those who knew her will attest that she was always forthright in expressing her views, and she never hesitated to single out chemical agents as threats to human health when the evidence warranted. The mission of her work, in large part, was the protection of children, and all available evidence suggests that she did everything she could to reveal rather than conceal any dangers when conducting research at UC Berkeley. We, like so many of her peers around the world, have great confidence in the scholarly work Dr. Buffler produced at the University, work that included more than 200 published articles over the course of her academic career, including 82 articles on childhood leukemia since her research program started in 1995.

We also have great confidence in the integrity of the past and ongoing research work of Dr. Buffler’s collaborators in the Childhood Leukemia Study Group. This is derived, in part, from the fact that the group has in place multiple checks, both internal and external, on the integrity and validity of its reported research results. The group consists of a number of scientists, students and technicians working independently. Beginning in 2000 and continuing to the present, all the data in the Childhood Leukemia Study Group has been collected by an independent campus survey research organization (SRO) or by an independent private SRO. SRO activities were always overseen and managed by a committee that included the project manager, the associate director for research, and Dr. Buffler, as well as staff/researchers. None of the committee members reported any effort by Dr. Buffler to exclude, limit, or alter any data collected that might have been unfavorable to data was supervised by the project manager and the associate director for research. Study data are stored on a secured server located on campus. Access to any study data is restricted to the staff and scientists in compliance with State and UC Berkeley regulations, and no data were provided to industry contacts. Also laboratory studies were conducted by co-investigators in independent laboratories.

The actual statistical data analyses were conducted by either senior researchers such as statisticians, the associate director for research, or junior researchers such as post-docs and graduate students under the supervision of senior researchers.

Manuscripts were prepared by the lead author (not by Dr. Buffler), and multiple iterative drafts were reviewed by all co-authors including Dr. Buffler. Both positive and negative findings that used original data from the Childhood Leukemia Study Group were published, regardless of the contents. More specifically, the group did indeed publish papers showing increased risks of childhood leukemia with self-reported home use of some pesticides (Ma et al, EHP, 2002), increased risk with some agricultural herbicides (Metayer et al. JESEE 2013), gene modification on association with home pesticides (Chokkalingam et al. Cancer Causes and Control, 2013), and increased risk with proximity to applications of certain agricultural pesticides (Rull et al, Environm Res, 2009).

Dr. Buffler worked tirelessly to improve the methodologies to quantify exposure to chemicals in epidemiologic studies, and to establish international collaborations to better identify the causes of leukemia in children. 

Had she lived, Dr. Buffler was going to be the next president of the International Epidemiological Association. The association’s obituary for Dr. Buffler noted her objectivity, saying, “She was an advocate with a strong sense of pragmatism, putting science first in the agenda, without getting side-tracked by the emotional tones of a debate.”

The attention brought by the article to the importance of disclosure of potential conflicts of interest in public health research has prompted a review of our procedures at the School of Public Health. We have learned that this is an unusual situation within our school, as no other member of our Faculty Senate from the School of Public Health is a member of a for-profit corporate governing board. We will be reviewing our conflict of interest training to ensure we have regular discussions about it with our faculty. We are committed to ensuring that those faculty who do have potentially disclosable private interests fully understand their disclosure obligations, including to funders, colleagues, students, and publishers.

In today’s world there is and should be extensive collaboration between the public sector, the private sector and the academy. This creates a situation where real and potential conflicts of interest cannot be eliminated—they must be managed.  We at the School of Public Health are committed to constantly improving our approach to these collaborations and to fostering robust open dialogue about these issues.  However, it greatly saddens us that the reputation of a beloved faculty member who was revered by her colleagues, students, and peers around the world has been challenged within a couple of months of her death, when she is no longer able to participate in that robust dialogue, and while we and her family are still in mourning. She would probably have provided many explanations, among them the admonition that if we make it too difficult for an academic epidemiologist to serve on the board of a large chemical company, then chemical companies won’t have academic epidemiologists on their boards—and that outcome might be worse for the public’s health than the alternative.  ■
 

Reader Comments:
Have a thought or comment on this story ?  Fill out the information below and we'll post it on this page once it's been reviewed by our editors.