Angry in the Great White North

[For a similar analysis of Kirsty Duncan, check out Etobicoke North: Can You Judge A Candidate By Her Book Review? at The Phantom Observer]

Liberal Party leader Stephane Dion has appointed another candidate without consulting with, well, anyone:

Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion is courting renewed controversy with his decision to appoint Toronto professor and author Kirsty Duncan as the candidate for Etobicoke North in the next election, replacing MP Roy Cullen.

"This is such a privilege," Duncan told the Star yesterday.

Though Duncan, a 41-year-old associate professor at the University of Toronto, is seen as a prize catch for the Liberals and a significant addition toward Dion's goal of fielding 103 women candidates in the next election, her appointment could be raising a few hackles in the riding.

Etobicoke North's riding president, Ranjit Chahal, said he was caught off guard by the announcement, saying he learned of Duncan's appointment only when the Star contacted him. "I was talking to Roy Cullen this morning. He didn't even mention it."

Chahal has called a riding meeting tonight to discuss how to react to Duncan's selection.

While we wait for the riding association to decide what to do about Duncan's sudden appearance, let's get to know Kirsty Duncan a bit better.

Kirsty Duncan is rather well known, you know, for a scientist who isn't demanding the imprisonment of politicians.  She made a splash with a well-documented expedition to Norway to dig up the bodies of miners who died of the 1918 Spanish Flue pandemic.  Her goal was to recover samples of the virus:

Duncan is also a specialist in pandemic preparedness. When she read about the 1918 influenza pandemic that swept the world to become the worst plague in human history, she was horrified that we still knew so little about the flu and why it had spread so quickly. In an effort to prepare for what is thought by experts to be inevitable – the next pandemic – she led an international, multidisciplinary scientific expedition to exhume the bodies of a group of Norwegian miners, all victims of the 1918 flu.

Kirsty Duncan is not a doctor, nor a virologist, nor a geneticist.  But Kirsty Duncan said that her lack of domain expertise was not a problem:

"I know my limitations," she said humbly, when I had the temerity to suggest that her "virology-free background" might sometimes prove embarrassing. "And I do rely heavily on them for science knowledge ... But you know what?" She paused for a moment, leaning forward beseechingly, nostrils flaring, brow wrinkling. "I have never felt at a disadvantage not being from science." Twisting the ring on her wedding finger, she repeated a line I had heard several times before: "I have always stressed to the team the importance of recognising the work of fellow colleagues from other disciplines." She smiled timdily, then layered on a wider, very winning grin. I was bewitched.

The person who commented on Duncan's experience in anything other than virology was Esther Oxford, the daughter of John Oxford, a professor of virology, who was a member of Duncan's team that went to Norway.

Esther Oxford recalls the strange relationship that developed between her father (who was 56 and married) and the 30-year-old Duncan:

So started an affair of fax and telephone which lasted "too long", according to Gillian Oxford, my mother. Meals were interrupted, evenings disappeared, work-days were filled with constant messages, calls and faxes - all of which featured touchy-feely words such as: "overwhelming", "truly", "deep". "Your father and I were excited by one another," said Duncan, wistfully picking up another cashew, and gazing out of the window. "I liked his enthusiasm for the project specifically - but also his enthusiasm for life in general."

During that time Dr Duncan separated from her husband and called my father in tears. I wondered why she bothered; I happened to be visiting that evening, and heard him say, "Worse things could have happened, Kirsty." Like what? I asked him later. "Oh, you know, death, an accident, disease ... you know," he said vaguely.

Duncan and Oxford had a falling out, soon after Oxford had secured funding for the expedition:

Squabbles erupted - over intellectual rights, funding, management of the press, and leadership. But still it was a shock for me to arrive in Svalbard and find that this "internal strife" was still seething. Not once during the two press conferences of the first week was my father's name, nor the names of other absent virologists, mentioned, even when Dr Duncan was asked specifically to list the names and roles of team members.

Doesn't play well with others.

But then this was not about Oxford, or about the Spanish Flu, it seems.  As Esther Oxford recalls, it was the Kirsty Duncan show:

My father was in Ireland at the time; two other senior scientists had not yet arrived. Dr Daniels was the only virologist present, and he kept a low profile, not speaking to the press until a journalist from the New York Times insisted on it. Instead other team members leapt into the spotlight. We had the pathologist in the graveyard thanking God "for the majesty of his creation", then posing for the cameras in a biological safety suit complete with respirator. We had a microbiologist trying to lecture us on virology. Most entertaining was Dr Duncan (or Professor Duncan, as she was now referred to). For five long days we had Kirsty Duncan talking endlessly about her hurts, hopes and fears at the graveyard, Kirsty Duncan wearing a short skirtatex leggings/sexy suede and high heels at the graveyard, Kirsty Duncan in tears at the graveyard, Kirsty Duncan laying a wreath and demanding a minute's silence - at the graveyard. "What are we going to have next?" joked a cameraman. "Kirsty Duncan carrying the Olympic torch?"

Kirsty Duncan comes off as narcissistic and attention hungry, despite her protestations:

I thought about Kirsty Duncan. Yes, she had done an excellent job of locating the bodies and building relations with the community in Longyearbyen. But was a geographer the best person to handle a team of awkward scientists? "I did not undertake this project for attention," she had assured me, nine days before. "I undertook this project because I was horrified about the virus." Walking up that long road to the graveyard I had no doubt that she cared about "making better anti-viral drugs" as she puts it. But did she have to come bounding into the bar, minutes after the post-mortem closure- meeting, with a smiling, flushed face? "I don't know why the press keep asking me if I am disappointed with the samples. I am not disappointed! I feel ecstatic!" she'd said, kneeling beside me. The journalists around looked on with amusement at the latest piece of spin-doctoring. I felt myself recoiling.

That description comes up over and over again.  Kirsty Duncan as vain and self-centered:

It is clear that many of the scientists she invited to join what she referred to as "my team" regarded this young Canadian geographer with a mixture of contempt and respect. On the one hand, she was perhaps her own worst enemy, coming across as a vain, self-centered person full of her own importance and sanctimonious to a degree. It is also clear why some of the scientists she invited to join her team found some of her behavior irritating. One was heard to say, "Young lady, I have spent all my life working on influenza. You are a neophyte in this area."

And again, in a review of Gina Kolata's "Flu: The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic":

First the good. This timely and credible treatment of influenza fills a critical void. The book is very readable. Although concentrating on historical vignettes to the exclusion of scientific explanations, the book provides a helpful background for the consideration of risk, public policy, and personal preparation that arise from confusing, contradictory, and incomplete news items about flu outbreaks and related public health initiatives.

Kolata clearly communicates the uncertainties in current understanding of how the flu virus evolves and flu epidemics spread. But she is even-handed to a fault in her descriptions of competing theories and scientists - showing for example way too mu?h patience for the narcissistic Kirsty Duncan.

At least one colleague in her field of medical geography is similarly disappointed with Kristy Duncan's approach to science.  Consider comments made in a review of Duncan's book recounting her Norwegian adventure by the adjunct professor of geography (medical) at UBC, Tom Koch:

The book serves best as a one-sided sociology of the complexities of modern multidisciplinary science.  The issue is less the hunt for the virus, that is, the technical problems of the work, than the troubling interpersonal and academic dynamics that for eight years strained the international and multidisciplinary team Duncan attempted to hold together and lead. In this book, Duncan settles scores, meticulously documenting every oversight and slight that occurred along the way.

Heaven knows, she chronicles enough of them.

And why would people not have taken Duncan seriously?

Duncan the geographer wants to control and lead a team investigating one of the critical epidemiological puzzles of our age: the viral profile of the 1918 influenza. This means she is an amateur in the precise fields whose expertise is required to carry out the project she has conceived. She is not an epidemiologist, a virologist, or a genetic scientist.

But as we know from the example of David Suzuki, being a "scientist" in any field is good enough to pass as an expert in other fields of science.  The same goes in engineering.  I'm trained as an electrical engineer, but that doesn't stop me from designing bridges.

OK, that's not true. 

Still, Duncan got what she believes to be a rough ride, though she shouldn't expect any sympathy:

Duncan still smarts from every slight received as a result. Consider the litany: powerful granting organizations wanted to take control of the project, putting their own people forward. Team members wanted to promote their own laboratories and contributions to the research. Reporters pestered Duncan constantly and never got things right, misquoting her in books and newspaper articles. Why is she surprised? Veterans of interdisciplinary research will shrug and say “So, what’s new? What did she expect?”.

Still, if reporters got things wrong, Duncan has to concede that those reporters were there because she wanted them there:

They [reporters and documentary filmmakers] were there from the very beginning with Kirsty Duncan. From the very beginning, when she started pulling her team together and saying, `Let's discuss this possibility, going to Norway,' she had the cameras rolling.

Indeed, this desire for media exposure might have been at the heart of the breakdown between Duncan and Oxford:

But if the Norwegian bodies should turn out to be perfectly preserved there was still a chance of acquiring live virus, which would certainly provide a scientific breakthrough. This was what the virologists hoped for, but Duncan stubbornly insisted it wasn't, and never had been, the purpose of the expedition (though she never makes it clear why she objected). By this time, relations between individuals - and nations - had deteriorated to the point of no return. Duncan's particular bete noire is the British professor John Oxford, who negotiated a large part of the funding with the pharmaceutical company Roche and, in Duncan's view, used the power this gave him to sideline her and hijack her project. Oxford's view, incautiously but forcefully expressed, was that she was 'a megalomaniac and a control freak'. Then, when the miners' graves were found to be too shallow for the bodies to have been perfectly preserved, Oxford further infuriated Duncan by speaking out of turn and openly expressing his disappointment to the attendant media circus.

Megalomaniac and control freak?

Well, guess what?  After spending millions of dollars and expending untold hours of film stock, the Duncan expedition came up empty-handed.  Despite the use of elaborate ground-penetrating radar, the bodies of the miners were discovered to be buried above the permafrost.  The yearly thawing meant that just about all the soft tissue was gone, including the critical lung tissue.

Of course, that's not the way it was reported in the press:

So she said--she issued a press release that said, "We have succeeded. We've gotten soft tissue."  And people who were there told me that, actually, what she basically had was skeletons and that there was--that they took bone tissue, and they also took some tissue from brain, but there was bas--there was no lung there. And she--she now...

Gee, some people would call that lying.

Ironically, a different expedition succeeded:

Duncan put together an impressive, well-financed team including world-class scientists from England, Canada and the U.S. The costly project, taking about four years to plan, generated worldwide publicity and debates over the potential danger of releasing live flu viruses from the bodies of the long- dead miners.

That mission ended in disappointment - the ground the miners were buried in had thawed and refrozen.

By contrast, [San Francisco physician Johan Hultin's] homespun expedition, which took mere days to plan, generated no publicity and cost $3,200, which Hultin himself paid.

Four days after opening the ground, Hultin discovered, seven feet deep, a woman's corpse. Fancifully, he dubbed her Lucy. Later he learned that Lucy had been an obese woman who died from the flu in her mid-20s.

Using his wife's pruning shears, Hultin opened Lucy's mummified rib cage. There he found two frozen lungs, the very tissue he needed.

"Her lungs were magnificent, full of blood," Hultin says.

He removed the lungs, sliced them, placed them in preserving fluid. Then he and the village helpers replaced the graveyard sod.

I'm willing to bet Hultin doesn't wear spandex.

So was Kirsty Duncan pleased that a fellow scientist succeeded so magnificently, you know, advancing knowledge and doing a service for humanity?  Hardly:

The lung tissue [recovered in 1951 from the bodies of Alaskan victims of the pandemic] had been preserved in paraffin blocks, and in a series of incredibly painstaking experiments some sequences of RNA of the 1918 flu virus were obtained. This work came to the attention of Johan Hultin, who had been a member of the 1951 expedition to Alaska. Hultin called Taubenberger and offered to return to Alaska to take more samples from the frozen bodies. Taubenberger asked Hultin when he could go, thinking it might be in a year or so. The answer was, "Not this week, but I could go next week." Hultin did go and was able to obtain some well-preserved lung-tissue samples, which have now made possible the determination of much of the RNA sequence of the 1918 influenza virus. Hultin's success was enormously distressing to Kirsty Duncan. She referred to him as "the Boy Scout" and when they later met refused to talk to him. Her ungracious behavior is understandable. Duncan's bloated, over-funded, overpublicized expedition, which had taken six years to organize, had failed, whereas someone else, working on his own, quietly and with no publicity and little in the way of funds, had succeeded.

Did anything come of the Duncam expedition?  Anything at all?  As it turned out, the samples did result is some modest information on the genetics of the Spanish Flu, as reported in a news conference -- hosted by John Oxford and not by Kirsty Duncan:

Two years ago, a team of scientists, led by Canadian Dr. Kirsty Duncan, went to search for traces of the virus and found them.

On the Norwegian island of Spitzbergen, seven coal miners died in the flu epidemic in 1918. They were buried in the permafrost.

The researchers exhumed six of the frozen bodies and took away 92 tissue samples for analysis.

On Tuesday in London, England, the preliminary results were unveiled.

The samples contain a "signal" of the ribonucleic acid, RNA, of the virus. This signal can help virologists unravel the genetic code of the bug.

For Kirsty Duncan it was a somewhat sour day of triumph. She and the Norwegians weren't invited to the press conference for the announcement.

Dr. John Oxford, the virologist who organized the conference, said it wasn't meant as a snub. He said that the meeting was about virology, and not the expedition to Spitzbergen.

Not a snub, but perhaps payback for the Duncan news conferences where Oxford's name was never mentioned. 

Ironically, maybe even these modest results are questionable.  Look who was involved in the autopsies of the unearthed miners:

Barry Blenkinsop, an assistant pathologist from the Chief Coroner's office in Ontario, Canada, conducted the autopsies. His colleague, Charles Smith, took tooth samples from each of the six men.

Charles Smith has since been revealed a pathologist who went way beyond his area of expertise, and every case he's ever been involved in is now under review:

Dr. Charles Smith was once considered top-notch in his field of forensic child pathology. In 1999, a Fifth Estate documentary singled him out as one of four Canadians with this rare expertise.

But Smith no longer practises pathology. An Ontario coroner's inquiry reviewed 45 child autopsies in which Smith had concluded the cause of death was either homicide or criminally suspicious.

The coroner's review found that Smith made questionable conclusions of foul play in 20 of the cases — 13 of which had resulted in criminal convictions. After the review's findings were made public in April 2007, Ontario's government ordered a public inquiry into the doctor's practices.

"I am very surprised with the overall results of the review, and concerned," [Dr. Barry McLellan, Ontario's chief coroner,] said. "In a number of cases, the reviewers felt that Dr. Smith had provided an opinion regarding the cause of death that was not reasonably supported by the materials available for review."

The chief coroner said the results of the review were being shared with defence and Crown attorneys involved in all of the relevant criminal cases.

Lucky for Duncan that her expedition was not a legal exercise, or else the presence of Charles Smith would have immediately put any results coming from it under a cloud of suspicion.

But then at the time, there was no way for Duncan to have known this.  And anyway, you don't find the influenza virus on teeth, but in lung fluids.

Kirsty Duncan seems to have a need to be in the spotlight, and to be in control:

BRIAN LAMB, host: Gina Kolata, author of "Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It."

LAMB: Now there's a picture missing from your book of Kirsty Duncan.

Ms. KOLATA: Oh, right.

LAMB: Why no picture of Kirsty Duncan?

Ms. KOLATA: You want to know the truth?

LAMB: Sure.

Ms. KOLATA: OK. I had wanted to put a picture of Kirsty Duncan in and the problem was that she kept writing these letters that indicated that in order to use the picture, she wanted to have some sort of control over what was said. And...

LAMB: Does that track with--I mean--I--I mean, I'm asking a leading question based on what...

Ms. KOLATA: I mean, I can understand if she was worried about--you know, she's worried about would everything be right? Would it be the version she would want to be in there? But as a journalist, you can't let somebody control what's said in a book. I mean, I want to be absolutely accurate. I will check facts forever. I will check anything, but I can't tell you that you can write it for me.

All of this paints an interesting picture of Dr Kirsty Duncan.  Controlling.  Vain.  Paranoid is probably a bit too far.  Still, Stephane Dion describes Kirsty Duncan in glowing terms:

“Kirsty is an extremely accomplished person. She is an internationally-renowned health expert on pandemic influenza, global warming and the environment. She was on the team of Nobel Prize winning Canadians for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Kirsty is a professor, author of two books, and a sought-after speaker at international conferences.”

Mr. Dion also lauded Dr. Duncan for her diverse interests, including the fact that she is a marathon runner who has competed in the Boston Marathon seven times.

“I have no doubt that her vast professional experience combined with her passion for the issues facing the people of Etobicoke North will make her a strong candidate and an even stronger Member of Parliament,” said Mr. Dion.

Of course, now I wonder if Kirsty Duncan wrote that.  I doubt Oxford would call her "an internationally-renowned health expert on pandemic influenza".

In politics, people are misquoted, insulted, alternately ignored and relentlessly pursued, and worse.  Does it sound like Kirsty Duncan is the sort of person who would do well in that sort of environment?  Politics involves being at the centre of a great deal of attention, which she would probably enjoy, but it won't always be the sort of attention she likes.

Addendum: The Liberal Party news release makes an interesting comment:

A committed life-long member of the community, Dr. Duncan sits on the Advisory Board for Pandemic Flu for the Conference Board of Canada, the University of Toronto, and is also helping organizations prepare throughout the United States.

According to her CV, Duncan's home address is on Hartsdale Drive.  That would make her a resident of Etobicoke Center, not of Etobicoke North.  She is represented by Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj, not Roy Cullen, whom she is replacing.  I suppose it depends on how literally you read the phrase "member of the community".  The implication is that she is a member of the community she hopes to represent in parliament, Etobicoke North.  But then "community" is a vague term.  It could mean Etobicoke in general, or southern Ontario, or the planet Earth.

Not really a big deal.