In January 2000, a paper was published in a respected academic journal that trumpeted the successes of a Canadian lab in a burgeoning area of drug testing.The researchers who wrote the paper claimed they had analyzed strands of hair to trace long-term exposure to illicit drugs, such as cocaine, and used gold-standard testing to verify its results.What everyone failed to notice — from the medical institution where the lab was housed to the federal agency that funded the study to the journal that published the article — was that the gold-standard claim was a lie.In fact, Dr. Gideon Koren’s Motherisk lab at The Hospital for Sick Children rarely confirmed its results with gold-standard testing before 2010.That lie was exposed in 2015, amid a scandal that tore apart vulnerable families and prompted two government-commissioned inquiries, which found Motherisk made millions selling its hair tests for use in criminal and child-protection cases despite the fact that it often failed to verify its preliminary results. This was contrary to international forensic standards for evidence presented in court.Three years later, the article that was published in Forensic Science International still stands, uncorrected, polluting the scientific literature.Read more: Sick Kids orders systematic review of Dr. Gideon Koren’s published works Parents lose second bid to launch class-action suit against Motherisk over flawed hair testsBattle continues over proposed Motherisk class-action suitThe paper has been cited 54 times, as recently as May 2017. The journal told the Star this week that it will be “looking into these issues.”Citations — when other researchers cite the study as a reference in their published work — is an indication of its influence.A researcher’s publication record is the currency of modern-day science. It is the pre-requisite to securing competitive tenure-track positions at prestigious universities, the key to unl ...
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