When Boonseng Leelarthaepin, a scientist in Sydney, Australia, picked up the phone, he heard a question he didn't expect: Where, a voice said, is the missing data?
Leelarthaepin paused. "I knew in my mind where it was," he said later. He went to his garage and dug through decades of boxes and old scientific papers and found it–"an obsolete 9-track magnetic computer tape" on an "unremarkable looking brown spool with a faded 3M label that had the words LEE 3 printed in blue ink," reports Kelly Crowe of the CBC.
The data was from the 40-year-old Sydney Diet Heart Study, and the person asking for it was Christopher Ramsden at the National Institutes of Health. By breaking down the data in ways that were not done at the time of the original Sydney study, he was able to find that omega-6 unsaturated fatty acids in safflower oil could increase the risk of a heart attack, not decrease it, as researchers had thought. Ramsden's study was published Feb. 5 in BMJ, the British medical journal.
The study is of course not definitive, and more research will need to be done to understand why this particular unsaturated fat could be bad for health. But Ramsden's detective work, tracking down Leelarthaepin and converting the brown spool of tape into something that could be read by modern computers caught Crowe's eye.
She was able to make a nice story of science-at-work out of a study that most other news outlets ignored. And she did a good job of explaining the science.
She also expanded on an idea in BMJ's press release–namely, the importance of keeping and making all medical trials data available to researchers. The data recovered from Sydney "has filled a critical gap in the published literature," Ramsden and colleagues wrote. It's just one of many examples of data that was collected and never published, the BMJ said. As Crowe reported, "the current best estimate is tha thalf of all the clinical trials that are ocnducted and completed are never published."
It's a good piece of quick, but substantial, enterprise reporting.
-Paul Raeburn
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