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Doing Science Under Protest

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By Chris Woolston

For the record, Marilyn Carroll is not a vivisectionist. Protesters have been hurling that label at her for more than 15 years -- one showed up at her doorstep with a tombstone-shaped sign reading, "You will never R.I.P., Marilyn the Vivisector" -- but they apparently never bothered to check the definition.

Ms. Carroll, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, doesn't cut into live bodies, although she isn't opposed to such practices in the name of science. She feeds cocaine and other drugs to rats and rhesus monkeys to study the various stages of drug addiction. The monkeys in her lab play with toys, watch television every morning, and occasionally smoke cocaine and heroin. "They have pretty good lives," she says. "Better than most animals in zoos."

Also for the record, Richard Deyo is not the "Great Satan" -- a title bestowed on him a few years ago by a fellow physician. Dr. Deyo, a professor of medicine and health services at the University of Washington, has spent much of his career studying various treatments for back pain. He may not rule the Underworld, but he has managed to make a few enemies. In recent years, disgruntled surgeons have publicly questioned his competence and nearly dismantled the government agency that supported his research.

Despite the protests and personal attacks, Ms. Carroll and Dr. Deyo haven't backed down. They still win grants, conduct research, and publish papers. But it hasn't always been easy. Life in the cross hairs demands caution, strategy, and perseverance -- not to mention skin as tough as Kevlar.

"Why do you torture monkeys?"

Ms. Carroll got her first taste of hard-core protests in 1986, when 75 activists stormed the hallway outside of her lab. They agreed to leave on one condition: Ms. Carroll had to hold a "press" conference. Predictably, the conference soon turned into a turkey shoot. Why did she torture monkeys? Why didn't she study skid-row bums instead? Why didn't she hurry up and have her baby so she could put it in a cage? (Ms. Carroll was visibly pregnant at the time.)

Several years later, somebody sent graphic pictures of animal mutilations to 400 of Ms. Carroll's neighbors. Her children started hearing taunts at school -- "Your mother tortures animals" -- and came home crying. Suddenly, all of the other hassles Ms. Carroll faced -- the picketers at her doorsteps, the chants, the harassing e-mail messages and phone calls -- seemed trivial. "That's as close as I ever came to quitting," she says. "I was ready to bag it."

But then she received something that made all of the difference: a little support. "The president of the university sent a personal letter to all of my neighbors, and I started getting tons of encouraging letters from the National Science Foundation, the Society for Neuroscience, and other places," she says.

Getting tough

Over the years, Ms. Carroll has learned to take the offensive. "My first instinct was to not give them any attention," she says. "Being the psychologist that I am, I didn't want to reward them." Now, when protesters come to her home or her office, she takes pictures and calls the police. She digs up information on her adversaries and shares what she knows with the authorities. "My husband and I have become pretty good detectives," she says.

Instead of hiding, she decided to become highly visible. She welcomes reporters to her lab, a policy that has generated streams of positive articles. Taylor Bennett, vice chancellor for research resources at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says an open-door policy can pay big dividends to any researcher who's under attack. "When the press sees what's going on, they don't give protesters much coverage," he says. "And if they don't get coverage, it ceases to be an issue."

Her tactics have worked. Many of the activists were students who narrowly avoided expulsion, and a judge ordered one to pay a fine of several hundred dollars for trespassing in Ms. Carroll's yard. She put the money directly toward her research. "I acknowledge his support in all of my journal articles," she says. Her e-mail is still clogged with harassing messages, but she hasn't seen any picketers in a while. "Everyone's lying pretty low."

Defending the data

Dr. Deyo's enemies never got quite so personal. He never had to shoo away picketers or console his children. He did, however, have to vigorously defend himself. More to the point, he had to defend his data.

In the mid-1990s, he published several studies suggesting that spinal-fusion surgery was over-prescribed and often harmful. The research was financed by the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, an arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that established guidelines for various medical procedures. (Now known as the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, it no longer provides clinical guidelines.)

Not surprisingly, Dr. Deyo's findings raised the ire of many spinal surgeons. An "aggressive" segment of the North American Spine Society, he says, waged an all-out campaign to discredit him and cut off his financing. They wrote scathing letters to medical journals -- some of them not fit to print -- and, more importantly, they got the ear of Congress, where the agency that supported Dr. Deyo's work was already under pressure from budget-cutting lawmakers.

Dr. Deyo knew all along that his findings would stir controversy. "I was told by a dean that if you get into health-services research, you're bound to ruffle feathers," he says. The potential for trouble is especially strong when the research focuses on real-world clinical practices. "People aren't likely to get attacked for describing new receptors on mitochondrial membranes," he says.

Still, the nature of the attacks came as a shock. "We were comfortable with scholarly scientific debate," he says. "We weren't prepared for character attacks and accusations coming from nowhere. It had the tone of a political campaign."

The best defense

Dr. Deyo responded in his own style, not theirs. He and his colleagues wrote thorough rebuttals to all of the accusations and complaints. They sent the rebuttals to the health-policy agency, giving it some ammunition against its critics.

The situation might have been even worse if he hadn't done considerable groundwork ahead of time. "A colleague of mine says, 'If you want people on board with you when you land, they have to be on board when you take off.'" To that end, he approached the American Association of Orthopedic Surgeons early on in his research. Members of the association reviewed several manuscripts before they were published. "We made sure nobody was blindsided," he says.

In the end, he says, his research was his best defense. "You have to do such high-quality research that the science itself will stand," he says. "The more rigorous it is, the less vulnerable it's going to be."

Like Ms. Carroll, Dr. Deyo is now enjoying some hard-won peace. The surgeons' association continues to support his research, and the North American Spine Society even invited him to speak at a meeting. "I haven't been called the Great Satan in a while," he says. "As far as I know."