by Brad Racino & Jill Castellano / inewsource / April 18, 2019
Tens of millions of people have volunteered their time and bodies to help create breakthroughs in medicine. You see the results with the pain relievers in your medicine cabinet, the vaccines that protect you from disease, the pacemakers that keep your heart beating and the innovations happening now with stem cells.
Yet the systems meant to protect those volunteers from harm are far from perfect, and research violations by Dr. Kang Zhang, an eye doctor at the University of California San Diego, show just how easily that well-intentioned framework can collapse.
Zhang is the chief of eye genetics at UCSD and has a lab named after him at the university. He receives millions of dollars in federal grants and presents at symposiums around the world.
A few years ago, he helped develop a way to remove cataracts from infants and regenerate their lenses using their own stem cells. He also built a tool that scanned over a million patient records and diagnosed illnesses with more than 90% accuracy.
But several of Zhang’s studies were riddled with violations of basic human research standards. A U.S. Food and Drug Administration warning in 2017 and a UCSD audit that followed reveal a pattern that put patients in harm’s way for years.
For the balance of this article, please go to inewsource.
{ 0 comments… add one now }