Open Letter to Director of Medical Education

This afternoon I will speak to the director of medical education about her role as the head of the ethics board that controlled kidney transplants in Tamil Nadu. At the same time I will also drop by the office of Dr. Chinniyan who controls the records of the one eyed baby, and could release information on her death. This is a copy of the letter I am sending to the DCME.

Dear Director of Medical Education,

For the last six months I have been working on a story for Wired News (www.wired.com) about an illegal clinical trial that may have been going on in Chennai for more than a year. On July 29th a child diagnosed with a rare chromosomal disorder known as cyclopia was born in Kasturba Gandhi Hospital and was registered under the name "Baby of Gomathi". On hearing the reports of the child I traveled to the hospital and spoke to the Superintendent Dhanalakshmi about the child's case. Dhanalakshmi informed me that she suspected it was a random genetic defect and that the child had gone for testing at GH Hospital. However she also stated and that the mother had taken a fertility treatment from an unnamed fertility clinic somewhere in Chennai and that also could have caused the deformity.

She later showed me an internal hospital report that suggested that the mother could have been given an experimental anti-cancer drug known as "cyclopamine" during her pregnancy that is known to cause this sort of deformity. After further investigation with my sources back in the United States, I discovered that several shipments of cyclopamine have been sent to India in the last few years by LC Labs and that it was possible that doctors here in Chennai were running an illegal clinical trial to test the drug.

I believe that the fertility clinic that Gomathi went to for treatment may have dosed her with cyclopamine during illegal medical research. Several years ago Sun Pharmaceuticals covertly tested the anti-cancer drug Letrozole on 400 women telling them that it was a fertility treatment. It is not beyond the realm of reason to think that it could be happening again.

When I returned the Kasturba Gandhi Hospital and informed Dhanalakshmi of the potential ethical problem she denied any possibility of a clinical trial and refused to investigate or share information on the child's case. I urgently request that you share the child's medical records with me (which should now be available since the child died over five months ago) so that I can track down the fertility clinic and be sure that there was no foul play.

You can track down the child's record information from her birth certificate, the information is listed below:

Child's Name: No name, Mother: Gomathi, Father: Nagaraj,
Zone: 06, Division: 86A
Registration Number: 5891
Birth Date: July 29, 2006

Please do what you can to release the child's information. You can contact me via cell phone at 9380185773, or e-mail at sgcarney@gmail.com


Sincerely,




Scott Carney
Wired News