CU Professor Distances Himself From Controversial Fertility Study

After three years of controversy, a fellow author’s unrelated fraud charge has led a Columbia professor to remove his name from a controversial study linking prayer and fertility.

Dr. Rogerio Lobo, a professor and former department chair in Health Sciences’ Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, was credited as the lead author in a study claiming that strangers’ prayers could double the chances of success of women seeking to become pregnant through in-vitro fertilization. Lobo co-wrote the paper with Dr. Kwang Cha, another Columbia researcher who has since left the University to run fertility clinics in Los Angeles, and Daniel Wirth, a California lawyer and researcher currently faced with indictment.

But since the peer-reviewed Journal of Reproductive Medicine published the study in September 2001, it has incurred scrutiny from the medical and research communities. Doctors and scientists have written letters to the journal accusing the researchers of error and possible fraud.

The researchers have presented no defense. Wirth claims he set up groups of Christians to pray for Korean women attempting to become pregnant, but he has been unable to produce any evidence that the groups ever existed. The two Columbia researchers associated with the project have refused to speak on the subject.

Suspicions were renewed this May, when Wirth was indicted on unrelated charges of fraud, theft, and conspiracy—the FBI alleges that he had stolen $2 million from Adelphia Communications and used the names of dead children to obtain loans, jobs, and passports.

After the charges against Wirth became public, Lobo removed his name from the study, claiming that he had helped write it but did not participate in the actual research.

Columbia University said in a statement that it supports Lobo’s decision to remove his name from the study.

“Although listed as a senior author, Dr. Lobo provided only stylistic guidance and editorial review,” the statement said.

Lobo’s withdrawal from the author list has also ended an investigation by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Human Research Protections, which charged that the human subjects of the study were not consenting participants because they had not been informed that people were praying for them. In a December 2001 letter to Columbia, the office said that it would not take action against the University because Dr. Lobo “first learned of the study from Dr. Cha 6-12 months after the study was completed.”

Authorship aside, major questions persist regarding the study’s methodology and results. The study contends that women who received intercessory prayer were 50 percent more likely to become pregnant than those who received no prayer; if the prayer groups never existed, it is unclear how the researchers could have obtained such stark and well-documented results.

Jerry Solfvin, Wirth’s thesis advisor and an adjunct associate professor at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, said he has worried about Wirth’s professional practices from the beginning. “I was getting lots of feedback that there were things going on in his professional behavior that didn’t smell right,” Solfvin said.

Solfvin is currently preparing a paper documenting systemic problems in Wirth’s research methods.

But Solfvin, who is himself engaged in research documenting connections between faith and healing, said that skeptics have no fair justification for doubting the honesty of this study in particular, and expressed frustration over efforts to discredit it.

“There’s no such thing as a single study that’s perfect,” Solfvin said. “Give me any article and I can discredit it.”

Other major researchers, however, see more problems with studies linking prayer and medicine than they do with other clinical research.

Dr. Richard Sloan, professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia and a longtime critic of studies linking faith and healing, noted that there is no way to control the amount of prayer received by any subject in an intercessory prayer study.

“In a drug study, you know precisely how much drug group A and group B get, because you, as the experimenter, give it,” Sloan said. “But people all over the world pray for the sick ... So assuming that there’s some kind of linear relationship between the quantity of the prayer and the effect—a dose-response relationship—you have no way to measure the effects of intercessory prayer.”

Beyond methodology, Sloan sees other reason for skepticism.

“There are problems with the underlying science of all this—the way in which the psychological or cognitive activity of some people could affect the health of people 3000 miles away,” Sloan said. “That violates everything we know and believe about science.”