Author's Response * Expert Working Groups--a reliable recipe

Abstract

in the Working Groups convened to prepare the Monographs. Dr Erren’s argument is that experts tend to be ‘self-interested researchers’, with an implicit or explicit tendency to promote their own research and to ‘upgrade’ the evaluation of a chemical or an exposure they have been working on, for self-promoting reasons. This argument is partially based on a citation from Raymond Neutra, who claims that ‘a heuristic tool that is used for deciding if an agent is hazardous is that a ‘‘good story’’ can be told’. Since I have served in IARC Monograph Working Groups several times starting in the early 1980s, and I have contributed to writing the Preamble of the Monographs, and since Dr Erren cites a paper of mine, 2 I feel entitled to reply. First, I found Dr Erren’s letter generic. Some examples would certainly help; I also wonder whether Dr Erren has ever participated in a Monograph Working Group. Secondly, in the Working Groups I have participated in, I always found a balanced mixture of what Dr Erren calls ‘experts’ and ‘non-experts’ (by the way, this terminology is slightly misleading, since usually all the members are experts; some of them are specialists of the specific topic that is discussed, others are not). Incidentally, Dr Erren might give a nice contribution to the literature by analysing the concrete composition of the Working Groups, since the names are published in the Monograph Volumes. It would be an interesting topic for a PhD studentship. My experience of Working Groups was rather different from Dr Erren’s account, because all experts, be they specialists or not, engaged in a thorough and critical evaluation of the literature on the basis of methodological standards, and only at the end of such discussion was an evaluation expressed. I did not find trace of self-promotion by experts, at least in the Monographs I was involved in. The Working Group meetings are preceded by a long preparatory work in which all relevant papers are summarized, and the whole procedure is highly transparent. If the question posed by Dr Erren concerns the balanced mixture of specialists and non-specialists (given that all are experts), then having specialists on board is obviously useful and is common practice in other boards with similar functions, such as the Cochrane Collaboration, the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) panels or agencies that produce clinical guidelines [such as the Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network (SIGN)]. Suggesting that the specialists have a vested interest and tend to promote their own research amounts to underestimating the scientific integrity of scientists involved in research on carcinogenesis.