After Katherine Eban and her students from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY published an investigation in STAT on Mount Sinai medical center’s controversial brain research project, the hospital system waged a behind-the-scenes campaign to blunt fallout from the story. Eban and her students received support from the Fund for both the original investigation and follow-up coverage on Mount Sinai’s damage-control efforts. In the initial investigation, the team uncovered how an FDA review found that Mount Sinai researchers were misleading patients and using a false justification to obtain brain biopsies during deep brain stimulation surgery. In the follow-up story, they reveal how Mount Sinai used “very thinly veiled legal threats,” as one source put it, to stop a professional society of neurosurgeons from issuing a statement that could have jeopardized the research. And it enlisted its own patients in a failed effort to demand a retraction of the initial investigation. A leading medical ethicist told the team that it is highly unusual for any physician to contact patients to press for a public endorsement or denunciation of a media story: “It is absolutely not ideal for somebody who is still actively treating the patient to be asking the patient for anything that is not for their medical benefit.”
In follow-up reporting, grantee documents medical center’s damage-control efforts after initial investigation of unethical brain study
