Prominent Canadian researcher loses libel case against documentary makers.

A formerly renowned researcher in the field of nutrition and immunology has lost his court bid to win damages from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation over a 2006 documentary. The programme alleged that Ranjit Kumar Chandra never conducted published studies into the immune benefits of baby formula and other studies that found a protective effect of multivitamins on cognition and infection in elderly patients. Ranjit Kumar Chandra published more than 200 articles while working at the Memorial University of Newfoundland and gained international renown in the field of immunology and nutrition, receiving the Order of Canada for his work. But Chandra’s career began to unravel in 2000 when he submitted a paper to The BMJ that seemed to show that his own patented vitamin supplement could improvememory in healthy elderly patients. The study, which followed up one published in the Lancet in 1992, immediately raised concern among BMJ editors, including the then editor in chief, Richard Smith, partly because the huge amount of psychometric testing involved seemed beyond the capabilities of a single author whose expertise was nutrition. Smith gave evidence at this month’s libel hearing in Toronto. The BMJ askedMemorial University to investigate but was told that Chandra had resigned his position and left the country. Meanwhile, Chandra offered the study to the journal Nutrition, which published it in 2001. Its striking results, out of line with other studies of the effects of vitamins on elderly people’s cognition, were reported by theNew York Times, drawing more critical attention towards Chandra. Aware that his studies were under attack, Chandra apparently sought to bolster his findings by publishing in Nutrition Research, a journal he founded and edited, a study that claimed similar effects to his own research article in Nutrition. The author of the study was named as Amrit Jain, but this author has never been traced beyond a rented mailbox in Canada. In 2005Nutrition retracted Chandra’s study (the article that The BMJ had rejected), and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation began to investigate Chandra’s past. They soon discovered that his research nurse had reported him to the university for scientific misconduct in 1992 after the nurse found the published results of a study of baby formula for which she had not yet recruited a quarter of the patients. AMemorial University review of his previous work, which had been finalised in 1994 but never published, showed that none of his claimed coauthors remembered working on the studies and that no raw data of any kind could be found. The review committee was “therefore led to conclude that scientific misconduct has been committed by Dr Chandra.” The university’s vice president, Jack Strawbridge, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that the threat of a “very, very large lawsuit” had dissuaded the university from taking disciplinary action. “He was looking at reducing the incidence of eczema,” Strawbridge said. “It wasn’t the same as life and death matters, where I think if those had been at stake it’s possible the university might have acted differently.” The libel case brought by Chandra against the broadcaster as a result of the documentary transmitted in 2006 was dismissed by a jury on 24 July.