Doctor Found Guilty of Forging Ethics Committee Permission for Drug Research
Distinguished doctor Lembit Allikmets was found guilty on December 5 of forging the consent of the University of Tartu clinical ethics committee he formerly headed. He was fined 1,524 euros.
The 75-year-old Allikmets was found to have forged documents in 2008 at a request from top surgeon Andres Sell, who wanted to test an anesthetic that lacked medicines agency approval on patients undergoing leg surgery.
The documents were backdated 2003 to ostensibly grant go-ahead for the experiments, which took place in 2006.
Allikmets had said in his defense that he agreed to the forgery to allow the University Hospital to save face before the international scientific community. As the ethics committee had in fact granted legitimate consent for Sell to conduct experiments in 2003-2005, Allikmets added the name of the unapproved anesthetic to one of the documents so that it would appear to a medical journal that indeed Sell had at least had the ethics committee's permission when he conducted the research.
But, said Allikmets, later he found out that Sell had already published the research in the spring. Allikmets claimed that Sell had thus deceived him, and in fact needed the forgery to mislead the State Agency of Medicines, not the journal editors.
Kristopher Rikken