Closer Look
Stanford president says it was his call not to correct a key paper
Amid an investigation of alleged research misconduct, Stanford University's president told STAT it was his decision not to correct or retract one of the papers at the heart of the controversy and defended his actions. "It was my call to conduct additional follow-up experiments rather than to correct or retract the 2009 study," Marc Tessier-Lavigne wrote about a major study in Nature in 2009 he co-authored while a top researcher at the biotech company Genentech.
Some researchers struggled to reproduce certain findings before and after the study was published, and follow-up research showed that aspects of the paper had been wrong. That has raised concerns among scientists at Stanford and elsewhere. But, as STAT's Jonathan Wosen points out, struggling to replicate past findings doesn't automatically mean those results were fraudulent, and Genentech's review found no evidence of fraud. But there's much more to this complicated case.
Read more.
public health
How Americans live with gun violence
In another measure of just how commonplace gun violence has become in the U.S., a KFF poll out today tells us 1 in 5 adults say they've been threatened by a gun (21%) or a family member has been killed by a gun, including suicide. And 1 in 6 (17%) say they've seen someone get shot. Black adults (34%) are about twice as likely as white (17%) or Hispanic (18%) adults to say a family member was killed by a gun and about twice as likely as white adults to say they witnessed someone being shot (31% v. 14%); Hispanic adults are in between (22%).
Meanwhile, about 4 in 10 adults (41%), and slightly more parents with children at home (44%) say that they live in a household with guns. Of those, 3 in 4 (77%) say they don't store their guns using common gun-safety practices.
hospitals
Most nonprofit hospitals spent less on charity care than they got in tax breaks
More than three-quarters of more than 1,700 nonprofit hospitals in the U.S. received more money in tax breaks than they spent on charity care or community programs, a new analysis reports, adding up to $14.2 billion in 2020. The Lown Institute report calls the difference between tax breaks and community spending a "fair share" deficit or surplus and notes that 2020 IRS filings for some large hospitals were unavailable.
The five hospitals with the highest deficit:
- UPMC Presbyterian Shadyside, Pittsburgh (-$246 million)
- NYU Langone Hospitals, New York (-$173 million)
- Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville (-$158 million)
- The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (-$151 million)
- Indiana University Health, Indianapolis (-$136 million)
The five hospitals with the highest surplus:
- NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, New York ($117 million)
- Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha ($116 million)
- Stanford Health Care, Stanford ($92 million)
- Mount Sinai Hospital, Chicago ($54 million)
- Christus Spohn Hospital, Corpus Christi ($47 million)
Correction: In an item last week about surgery to remove brain tumors without damaging nearby tissues, I misattributed "first, do no harm" to the Hippocratic oath, which does not contain those exact words. The phrase appears in another work by Hippocrates, called "Of the Epidemics." Thank you, alert readers.
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