Copenhagen University Hospital researcher Anders Perner was one decimal point away from getting sued for millions of dollars. In June, his paper comparing two treatments used in patients who had lost large amounts of blood, was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Perner and colleagues found that hydroxyethyl starch (HES), a widely used synthetic version of regular starch, carried more risks and was less effective than Ringer's acetate, a mildy hypotonic solution used to replace lost blood. But Perner and his team rounded to the nearest tenth when identifying the type of HES used in their study: they stated in the title and methods section that they used HES 130/0.4, when in fact it was HES 130/0.42. The first number (130) describes the molecular weight of the compound, and the second gives the number of hydroxyethyl groups in the starch. That would seem like a small and inconsequential ...
Kerfuffle Over Antishock Drug Paper
A slight flaw in a study on the effectiveness of a drug widely used to combat shock in critically injured patients almost gets a Danish researcher sued for millions.
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From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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