An Open Letter From a Genomic Altruist to a Genomic Extrovert (Re-Identification Symposium)

By Michelle Meyer

This post is part of Bill of Health‘s symposium on the Law, Ethics, and Science of Re-Identification Demonstrations. You can call up all of the symposium contributions here. We’ll continue to post contributions throughout the week. —MM

Dear Misha:

In your open letter to me, you write:

No one is asking you to be silent, blasé or happy about being cloned (your clone, however, tells me she is “totally psyched”).

First things first: I have an ever-growing list of things I wish I had done differently in life, so let me know when my clone has learned how to read, and I’ll send it on over; perhaps her path in life will be sufficiently similar to mine that she’ll benefit from at least a few items on the list.

Moving on to substance, here’s the thing: some people did say that PGP participants have no right to complain about being re-identified (and, by logical extension, about any of the other risks we assumed, including the risk of being cloned). It was my intention, in that post, to articulate and respond to three arguments that I’ve encountered, each of which suggests that re-identification demonstrations raise few or no ethical issues, at least in certain cases. To review, those arguments are:

  1. Participants who are warned by data holders of the risk of re-identification thereby consent to be re-identified by third parties.
  2. Participants who agree to provide data in an open access format for anyone to do with it whatever they like thereby gave blanket consent that necessarily included consent to using their data (combined with other data) to re-identify them.
  3. Re-identification is benign in the hands of scholars, as opposed to commercial or criminal actors.

I feel confident in rejecting the first and third arguments. (As you’ll see from the comments I left on your post, however, I struggled, and continue to struggle, with how to respond to the second argument; Madeleine also has some great thoughts.) Note, however, two things. First, none of my responses to these arguments was meant to suggest that I or anyone else had been “sold a bill of goods” by the PGP. I’m sorry that I must have written my post in such a way that it leant itself to that interpretation. All I intended to say was that, in acknowledging the PGP’s warning that re-identification by third parties is possible, participants did not give third parties permission to re-identify them. I was addressing the relationship between re-identification researchers and data providers more than that between data providers and data holders.

Second, even as to re-identification researchers, it doesn’t follow from my rejection of these three arguments that re-identification demonstrations are necessarily unethical, even when conducted without participant consent. Exploring that question is the aim, in part, of my next post. What I tried to do in the first post was clear some brush and push back against the idea that under the PGP model — a model that I think we both would like to see expand — participants have given permission to be re-identified, “end of [ethical] story.” Read More

Reflections of a Re-Identification Target, Part I: Some Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free (Re-Identification Symposium)

This post is part of Bill of Health‘s symposium on the Law, Ethics, and Science of Re-Identification Demonstrations. You can call up all of the symposium contributions here. Please note that Bill of Health continues to have problems receiving some comments. If you post a comment to any symposium piece and do not see it within half an hour or so, please email your comment to me at mmeyer @ law.harvard.edu and I will post it. —MM

By Michelle N. Meyer

I wear several hats for purposes of this symposium, in addition to organizer. First, I’m trained as a lawyer and an ethicist, and one of my areas of scholarly focus is research regulation and ethics, so I see re-identification demonstrations through that lens. Second, as a member of the advisory board of the Social Science Genetics Association Consortium (SSGAC), I advise data holders about ethical and regulatory aspects of their research, including issues of re-identification. I may have occasion to reflect on this role later in the symposium. For now, however, I want to put on my third hat: that of data provider to (a.k.a. research participant in) the Personal Genome Project (PGP), the most recent target of a pair of re-identification “attacks,” as even re-identification researchers themselves seem to call them.

In this first post, I’ll briefly discuss my experience as a target of a re-identification attack. In my discussions elsewhere about the PGP demonstrations, some have suggested that re-identification requires little or no ethical justification where (1) participants have been warned about the risk of re-identification; (2) participants have given blanket consent to all research uses of the data they make publicly available; and/or (3) the re-identification researchers are scholars rather than commercial or criminal actors.

In explaining below why I think each of these arguments is mistaken, I focus on the PGP re-identification demonstrations. I choose the PGP demonstrations not to single them out, but rather for several other reasons. First, the PGP attacks are the case studies with which, for obvious reasons, I’m most familiar, and I’m fortunate to have convinced so many other stakeholders involved in those demonstrations to participate in the symposium and help me fill out the picture with their perspectives. I also focus on the PGP because some view it as an “easy” case for re-identification work, given the features I just described. Therefore, if nonconsensual re-identification attacks on PGP participants are ethically problematic, then much other nonconsensual re-identification work is likely to be as well. Finally, although today the PGP may be somewhat unusual in being so frank with participants about the risk of re-identification and in engaging in such open access data sharing, both of these features, and especially the first, shouldn’t be unusual in research. To the extent that we move towards greater frankness about re-identification risk and broader data sharing, trying to achieve clarity about what these features of a research project do — and do not — mean for the appropriateness of re-identification demonstrations will be important.

Having argued here about how not to think about the ethics of re-identification studies, in a later post, I plan to provide some affirmative thoughts about an ethical framework for how we should think about this work.

Read More

Kudos to This American Life

By Michelle Meyer

A few weeks ago, I blogged about a recent episode of This American Life, “Dr. Gilmer and Mr. Hyde,” about the quest of one Dr. Gilmer (Benjamin) to understand why another, beloved Dr. Gilmer (Vince), had brutally murdered his own father after hearing voices that compelled him to do so. The episode ends (spoiler alert) with the revelation that Vince suffers from Huntington’s, a rare, neurodegenerative disease that causes progressive physicial, cognitive, and psychological deterioration.

Listeners, it seemed to me, could naturally conclude from the episode that it was Vince’s Huntington’s that had caused him to murder his father. That might or might not be true in this particular case. Huntington’s can cause behavioral and mood changes, including irritability, aggression and belligerence. It can also cause (less often) psychosis. But even if Huntington’s caused Vince to murder his father, or somehow contributed to the murder, the extreme violence that Vince displayed — strangling his father, then sawing off his father’s fingertips to preclude identification — is in no way typical of the Huntington’s population as a whole. And so what most troubled me about the episode was its failure to note just how rare this kind of extreme violence is among those with Huntington’s, just as it is very rare among human beings generally. And so I wrote to TAL, requesting a clarification.

I’m happy to report that the TAL producer for the episode, Sarah Koenig — who had not intended to suggest any causal link between Vince’s murder of his father and his Huntington’s, much less between murder and Huntington’s more generally — has issued a clarification on the show’s blog, and promises to make a similar clarification in the episode itself, should they ever re-air it. Kudos to TAL, and many thanks to Sarah for being incredibly gracious in our exchanges.

One clarification deserves another. In my earlier blog post, I also worried that some listeners might  conclude that Vince’s father was similarly driven to commit horrific acts of sexual abuse on Vince and his sister because he, too, was (presumably) suffering from Huntington’s (an autosomal dominant genetic disease). Although I think that a listener who didn’t know better could reasonably conclude that Huntington’s causes people to become sexual predators almost as easily as they could conclude from the episode that Huntington’s causes people to become murderers, nothing in the episode suggests that Sarah, Benjamin Gilmer, or anyone else at TAL believe that Huntington’s causes sexual abuse, or that they intended for listeners to reach that conclusion. I regret anything in my earlier post that suggested otherwise.

Again, I’m very grateful to Sarah and everyone else at TAL for hearing me (and other listeners) out and for agreeing to make the clarification — and just in time for HD Awareness Month!

Online Symposium on the Law, Ethics & Science of Re-identification Demonstrations

By Michelle Meyer

Over the course of the last fifteen or so years, the belief that “de-identification” of personally identifiable information preserves the anonymity of those individuals has been repeatedly called up short by scholars and journalists. It would be difficult to overstate the importance, for privacy law and policy, of the early work of “re-identification scholars,” as I’ll call them. In the mid-1990s, the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission (GIC) released data on individual hospital visits by state employees in order to aid important research. As Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld assured employees, their data had been “anonymized,” with all obvious identifiers, such as name, address, and Social Security number, removed. But Latanya Sweeney, then an MIT graduate student, wasn’t buying it. When, in 1996, Weld collapsed at a local event and was admitted to the hospital, she set out to show that she could re-identify his GIC entry. For twenty dollars, she purchased the full roll of Cambridge voter-registration records, and by linking the two data sets, which individually were innocuous enough, she was able to re-identify his GIC entry. As privacy law scholar Paul Ohm put it, “In a theatrical flourish, Dr. Sweeney sent the Governor’s health records (which included diagnoses and prescriptions) to his office.”

Sweeney’s demonstration led to important changes in privacy law, especially under HIPAA. But that demonstration was just the beginning. In 2006, the New York Times was able to re-identify one individual (and only one individual)  in a publicly available research dataset of the three-month AOL search history of over 600,000 users. The Times demonstration led to a class-action lawsuit (which settled out of court), an FTC complaint, and soul-searching in Congress. That same year, Netflix began a three-year contest, offering a $1 million prize to whomever could most improve the algorithm by which the company predicts how much a particular user will enjoy a particular movie. To enable the contest, Netflix made publicly available a dataset of the movie ratings of 500,000 of its customers, whose names it replaced with numerical identifiers. In a 2008 paper, Arvind Narayanan, then a graduate student at UT-Austin, along with his advisor, showed that by linking the “anonymized” Netflix prize dataset to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), in which viewers review movies, often under their own names, many Netflix users could be re-identified, revealing information that was suggestive of their political preferences and other potentially sensitive information. (Remarkably, notwithstanding the re-identification demonstration, after awarding the prize in 2009 to a team from AT&T, in 2010, Netflix announced plans for a second contest, which it cancelled only after tussling with a class-action lawsuit (again, settled out of court) and the FTC.) Earlier this year, Yaniv Erlich and colleagues, using a novel technique involving surnames and the Y chromosome, re-identified five men who had participated in the 1000 Genomes Project — an international consortium to place, in an open online database, the sequenced genomes of (as it turns out, 2500) “unidentified” people — who had also participated in a study of Mormon families in Utah.

Most recently, Sweeney and colleagues re-identified participants in Harvard’s Personal Genome Project (PGP), who are warned of this risk, using the same technique she used to re-identify Weld in 1997. As a scholar of research ethics and regulation — and also a PGP participant — this latest demonstration piqued my interest. Although much has been said about the appropriate legal and policy responses to these demonstrations (my own thoughts are here), there has been very little discussion about the legal and ethical aspects of the demonstrations themselves. As a modest step in filling that gap, I’m pleased to announce an online symposium, to take place here at the Bill of Health the week of May 20th, that will address both the scientific and policy value of these demonstrations and the legal and ethical issues they raise. Participants fill diverse stakeholder roles (data holder, data provider — i.e., research participant, re-identification researcher, privacy scholar, research ethicist) and will, I expect, have a range of perspectives on these questions:

Misha Angrist
Madeleine Ball

Daniel Barth-Jones

Yaniv Erlich

Beau Gunderson

Stephen Wilson

Michelle Meyer

Arvind Narayanan

Paul Ohm

Latanya Sweeney

Jennifer Wagner

I hope readers will join us on May 20.

UPDATE: You can call up all of the symposium contributions, in reverse chronological order, by clicking here.

Live Blogging from FDA in the 21st Century Conference, Plenary 2: Alta Charo on Integrating Speed and Safety

By Michelle Meyer

[This is off-the-cuff live blogging, so apologies for any errors, typos, etc]

Day two of PFC’s FDA in the 21st Century conference begins with a morning plenary by the very fabulous Alta Charo, of the University of Wisconsin Law School, who is speaking on “Integrating Speed and Safety.”

Today Alta is presenting what she calls “more of an initial idea than an actual proposal,” and she notes that she’s very interested to hear responses to it, so comment away or contact her offline. She wants to integrate into the usual and longstanding “FDA speed versus safety” debate some concerns that should be of interest to industry. “In other words,” she said, “I’d like to be nice to the drug people.”

Alta begins with a brief history of the speed versus safety debate, which turns out to be quite cyclical. Before 1906, she asks us to recall, we had true snake oil: products with high toxicity and little or no efficacy. Often these products were nevertheless perceived as effective because they contained alcohol or other drugs, so made you feel better at least, but of course that’s part of what made these products so dangerous, especially for children.

And so with the Federal Food and Drugs Act of 1906, we get post-market remedies for misbranding, although they require proof of intent. And then in 1937 over 100 children die from elixir of sulfanilamide. And the following year we get the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. But the FDCA targets only safety. (Although rightly Alta notes that it’s hard to see how regulators were truly only looking at safety and not also at some form of efficacy, since there is no such thing as safety in the abstract, only safety relative to purpose for which someone is taking the drug.) Read More

Live Blogging from FDA in the 21st Century Conference, Panel 2: Preserving Public Trust and Demanding Accountability

By Michelle Meyer

[This is off-the-cuff live blogging, so apologies for any errors, typos, etc]

First up is Mark Lange from Eli Lilly (who notes that he is here in his personal capacity only!), speaking about “Data Transparency and the Role of the FDA.”

He prefaces his talk by noting that when he refers to “data,” he means raw, patient-level data from clinical trials. Most calls for the transparency of such data, he says, reflect a common theme about lack of trust in the pharmaceutical industry. So we might wonder: why doesn’t the pharmaceutical industry simply accede to that request and make their data available?

Mark notes that industry has several concerns. One important one pertains to data exclusivity. In several (if not all) markets, data exclusivity rights are premised on keeping the relevant data confidential, and posting it publicly would be deemed a waiver of those rights. In addition, data exclusivity prevents generic competitors from free riding, and publishing data could allow them to circumvent the very point of data exclusivity.

Moving to privacy concerns, Mark notes that research subjects’ understanding is that their data will be used for particular purposes and shared with regulators, but not be publicly posted on the Internet for anyone to do with whatever they want. Relatedly, there is the potential for interpretation of public data to be biased; research results may be over-interpreted and analyses may be flawed or even erroneous. Competitors might look for fairly trivial flaws the the data and try to use them to their advantage rather than sincerely trying to advance scientific progress and transparency.

Mark suggests, however, the choice between privacy and transparency is a false one. A better alternative is available — namely, for objective, expert regulators such as the FDA to receive and vet data in ways that address both audiences and both sets of concerns. The FDA is in fact already experienced in doing this. For example, it determines whether research demonstrates that a drug is safe and effective for a particular use through its marketing application approval mechanism, and it determines the accuracy and adequacy of the portrayal of research results in product labeling and product advertisements. And late last year, it was given responsibility for overseeing clinicaltrials.gov, which includes results from all pre-specified primary and secondary outcomes measures from nearly all clinical trials either conducted in the U.S. or intended to be used in support of an application for marketing approval in the U.S. This new responsibility, Mark suggests, could be a powerful tool, depending on how the FDA uses it. For instance, the FDA could exercise authority to monitor and enforce the absence of required results and the inclusion of false or misleading results data.

In concluding, Mark stresses that, when faced with requests for public access to patient-level trial data, we should consider the important role of regulators as trusted intermediaries who can balance competing concerns. Read More

This American Life and Stigma

By Michelle Meyer

Update: This American Life has made a clarification. Please see this post for more.

Let me begin by saying how much I absolutely adore This American Life. I listen to it religiously. I particularly had been looking forward to the most recent pocast episode of TAL: Dr. Gilmer and Mr. Hyde. As the episode’s blurb teases, “Dr. Gilmer and Mr. Hyde” concerns a doctor — Benjamin Gilmer — who takes over the rural South Carolina practice of Vince Gilmer (no relation). Vince is no longer available to see patients because he is serving a prison sentence for killing his father. As Benjamin gets to know Vince’s — and now his — patients, he forms a picture of Vince that’s at odds with his status as a convicted father murderer. How could this doctor who was so devoted to his patients have so brutally murdered his own father?

This episode is right up my alley. True crime? Check. Forensic psychology? Check. The intersection of law and medicine? Yes, please. So when I awoke yesterday morning at 5 am and couldn’t go back to sleep, I eagerly cued up the podcast. The episode recounts, in TAL’s  typically-riveting fashion, the story of Benjamin’s search for the truth behind Vince’s murder of his father. I enjoyed every minute of the episode until the last five minutes or so, when I became troubled by one critical omission.

Spoilers  follow after the jump; listen to the episode first. Read More

Twitter Round-Up (2/16-2/23)

By Casey Thomson

This week’s round-up discusses the upcoming cases relevant to bioethics in the Supreme Court, the benefits of the Physician Payment Sunshine Act, the surprisingly low effectiveness rate of this year’s flu vaccine, and the problems with ACA’s Accountable Care Organizations. See below for details and more summaries:

  • Frank Pasquale (@FrankPasquale) shared a post on what’s being called the “alcoholism vaccine” being developed at the Institute for Cell Dynamics and Biotechnology at Universidad de Chile. The vaccine, which would have to be administered every 6 months or year, would mimic the alcohol intolerance mutation that prevents the breaking down of acetaldehyde and produces an instant “hangover-type” state. (2/16)
  • Dan Vorhaus (@genomicslawyer) retweeted a timeline from the Center for Law and Bioscience at Stanford Law’s blog giving dates for the upcoming Supreme Court cases relating to biosciences. (2/17)
  • Frank Pasquale (@FrankPasquale) additionally included a piece on the Physician Payment Sunshine Act, a provision of the Affordable Care Act that would “[require] manufacturers of drugs, medical devices and biologics to report the monetary value of gifts and payments to doctors and teaching hospitals on a publicly accessible website.” The author of the piece, a family physician with 15 years of experience, discussed his support for the plan. (2/17)
  • Michelle Meyer (@MichelleNMeyer) retweeted a link explaining the scientific foundations of the Brain Activity Map Project, namely how it aims at “reconstructing the full record of neural activity across complete neural circuits” to better understand “fundamental and pathological brain processes.” (2/18)
  • Arthur Caplan (@ArthurCaplan) posted a news story on police arresting those involved in the illegal harvesting of eggs from women in Bucharest, Romania. The police reports claim that 11 suspects have been implicated in the trafficking, which would harvest the eggs to be sold to Israeli couples with fertility problems. (2/19)
  • Alex Smith (@AlexSmithMD) retweeted a link to his post on asking about a patient’s PPD (preferred place of death), noting that this is not one of the concerns often cited as part of advanced planning procedures. Such a practice was considered “vital” in the UK, in contrast. (2/20)
  • Alex Smith (@AlexSmithMD) shared a link to a post on the blog he co-runs, GeriPal, on “Five Things Patients and Physicians Should Question in Palliative Care and Geriatrics.” The post shares the two lists posted by the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine (AAHPM) and the American Geriatrics Society (AGS), which Smith claims “provide targeted, evidence-based recommendations to help physicians and patients have conversations about making wise choices about their care in order to avoid interventions that provide little to no benefit.” (2/21)
  • Arthur Caplan (@ArthurCaplan) also included a link reviewing the low effectiveness of this year’s flu vaccine: there was evidence that it was only effective in 56% of the cases, on the low end of the usual 50-70% effectiveness rate. His tweet noted that this was strong evidence in favor of mandating the vaccine for healthcare workers. (2/21)
  • Michelle Meyer (@MichelleNMeyer) posted an op-ed piece by The Wall Street Journal about the problems with Affordable Care Act’s Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), namely their false assumptions: that success can come without changing doctor behavior, and without changing patient behavior, in a way that will save money. (2/23)

R.I.P. Ronald Dworkin (Dec. 11, 1931–Feb. 14, 2013)

By Michelle Meyer

I woke this morning to the very sad news that legal philosopher and NYU law professor Ronald Dworkin died in London early this morning of leukemia, at the age of 81.

I’m not sure whether his illness was well known to those within the legal academy, but it came as news to me, so I confess I’m slightly shocked by news of his death. Others, of course, are much better positioned to give thoughts about his life and career, and no doubt will, here and elsewhere. I’ll share just one brief remembrance. I was the founding co-editor of the Harvard Law Review Forum, and for our very first issue, I solicited a response from Professor Dworkin to Fred Schauer’s (Re)Taking Hart. These were the days when online supplements to law reviews were new, and we didn’t really know how scholars would view these opportunities. When he readily agreed to provide a response, I recall emailing the news around Gannett, to much rejoicing. This was an especially meaningful “get” for me, as in addition to his work in legal philosophy, I had read and appreciated Life’s Dominion as an undergraduate studying bioethics. I was terribly nervous about interacting with him, but he was incredibly kind and gracious and unassuming throughout the process.

Professor Dworkin leaves behind his wife, two children, and two grandchildren. They and his friends and colleagues are in my thoughts.

Update: Brian Leiter is aggregating memorial notices here.

Twitter Round-Up (1/27-2/7)

By Casey Thomson

Even the surprisingly resurrected Richard III (on the Twitter-sphere, anyway) appreciates bioethics concerns. Read on to find out more about Richard III’s eagerness for patient confidentiality and other updates in this week’s (extended) Twitter round-up:

  • Stephen Latham (@StephenLatham) included a link to his blog post challenging Andrew Francis’ recent claim that penicillin was the central drug spawning the sexual revolution of the 1960s. While penicillin may have facilitated the widespread acceptance of pre-marital relations, it was The Pill that “translat[ed] that newfound sexual freedom into sexual equality.” (1/28)
  • Dan Vorhaus (@genomicslawyer) posted a summary video regarding the Neanderthal baby story that rocked the internet in the past few weeks, as reported by Taiwan’s Next Media animation. (1/28)
  • Michelle Meyer (@MichelleNMeyer) shared a news report on Israel’s recent admittance to giving birth control to Ethiopian Jewish immigrants, frequently without either consent or knowledge. Concerns first arose after an investigative journalist began to explore why birth rates in the community had fallen so drastically and seemingly inexplicably. (1/28)
  • Arthur Caplan (@ArthurCaplan) linked to a piece explaining the future implications and consequences of the guidance requiring schools to make “reasonable modifications” in order to include students with disabilities in either general athletic programs or provide them with parallel opportunities. The guidance, while a potential huge move forward for individuals with disabilities, nonetheless will be nothing without “tough and honest conversation about financing and revenue – and soon.” (1/28)
  • Michelle Meyer (@MichelleNMeyer) retweeted an article showing the return of the “invisible gorilla” from the 2010 book, but this time in the fake CT scans shown to both expert radiologists and volunteers alike. The gorilla was large in size compared to the typically indicative nodules, and was unmistakably a gorilla, but yet 20 out of the 24 radiologists failed to see the gorilla. It’s a frightening real-life example of what the original study’s jargon terms as “inattentional blindness.” (1/29)
  • Kevin Outterson (@koutterson) live tweeted the Pew meeting concerning new antibiotic development pathways for limited populations. See the string of tweets on his Twitter page for further details of how the meeting proceeded. (1/31)
  • Daniel Goldberg (@prof_goldberg) shared a link describing the first scientific evidence suggesting that doctors can “truly feel” their patients’ pain. The study, done by Harvard researchers, used brain scans to indicate activated regions of physicians’ brains during a simulated interaction with patients. (2/1)
  • Frank Pasquale (@FrankPasquale) linked to a story on the problems associated with over-prescribing amphetamine-based medications, particularly to teenagers and young adults. While focusing on the individual story of an aspiring medical student named Richard Fee, the author delves into the underexposed side effects of often overzealous prescribing and the surprisingly casual attitude that most Americans hold towards this medication. (2/3)
  • Frank Pasquale (@FrankPasquale) also posted a piece inspired by the talk surrounding World Cancer Day on the problems related to cancer treatment in developing countries. Contrary to being solely a problem of so-called developed nations, cancer remains an issue globally – including such cancers that are caused by an infectious agent. Fighting the false notions – that cancer in developing nations is minimal, that it is always not “catchable,” and that enough care (particularly vaccines) is being delivered – is essential to reducing the global inequity in cancer treatment. (2/4)
  • Michelle Meyer (@MichelleNMeyer) retweeted the (supposedly resurrected and technologically adept) Richard III’s tweet regarding publication of details surrounding his newly-identified bones: “Hmmm not so happy about my physical attributes being discussed in public. What happened to patient confidentiality ???” (2/4)
  • Daniel Goldberg (@prof_goldberg) shared a report on a new study that found a correlation between low self-esteem and female body representation and obsession in “chick lit.” The report noted that the results suggested a possible “intervention tool” by having characters seek support from friends and family for such body concerns. (2/5)
  • Michelle Meyer (@MichelleNMeyer) retweeted a graphic eloquently summarizing one of the simplest and most potent arguments in favor of vaccination, and arguably the greater biopharmaceutical industry. (2/6)

Note: As mentioned in previous posts, retweeting should not be considered as an endorsement of or agreement with the content of the original tweet.