Edwards Case Casts Spotlight on a Long Reclusive Donor

Even in her prime, in the 1960s, when she redesigned the White House Rose Garden for her friend Jacqueline Kennedy, she avoided the public eye.

So it was a rude shock to her social strata when Mrs. Mellon, known chiefly for her passion for horticulture (she has collected more than 10,000 books on botany) and her decorum, became ensnared in the protracted scandal surrounding John Edwards, the former Democratic candidate for president.

Mr. Edwards was indicted by a federal grand jury on Friday on charges that he violated campaign finance laws in an effort to conceal an extramarital affair while running for president in 2008, mainly by using $725,000 given to him secretly by Mrs. Mellon. Mr. Edwards pleaded not guilty, and the case is headed for trial. Mrs. Mellon was not named in the indictment — she was referred to as Person C — but is essentially an unindicted co-conspirator.

Mrs. Mellon could not be reached for comment. But Bryan Huffman, a decorator from Monroe, N.C., who was the conduit for Mrs. Mellon’s checks to Mr. Edwards, said he spoke to her on Friday after the indictment.

“She’s upset that the whole thing has come to this particular moment,” he said. “She is standing by Senator Edwards but is sorry that the government has pursued these charges against him.” He said she did not understand why anyone cared.

Prosecution and defense officials said Friday that they could not discuss the legal implications for Mrs. Mellon, who is known as Bunny. Her lawyer declined to comment, but her team has said that the money was a personal gift and that she had no idea how Mr. Edwards used it.

Lawyers not involved in the case said it seemed unlikely that either side would try to compel Mrs. Mellon to appear in court, but she could be asked to provide written or video testimony.

Older people are often not perceived as reliable witnesses because their memories can be shaky or they may be easily confused on the stand. But Mr. Huffman, 47, said that Mrs. Mellon was in fine fettle for someone who is 100. “She is strong, resilient and in great physical shape,” he said, noting that she still does Pilates, which she learned from the master himself, Joseph Pilates, more than 50 years ago.

Mrs. Mellon did not appear before the grand jury in North Carolina that examined the Edwards case; federal investigators traveled twice to her 4,000-acre estate in Virginia horse country to interview her. This is typically how the reclusive Mrs. Mellon has socialized, with people coming to her — even Queen Elizabeth II paid a visit — rather than the other way around.

Rachel Lowe Lambert Lloyd Mellon, born Aug. 9, 1910, was raised in privilege. Her grandfather invented Listerine and her father was president of the Gillette Safety Razor Company. Her first marriage, to Stacy Barcroft Lloyd Jr., ended in divorce in 1948. Later that year, she married Paul Mellon, the philanthropist, art collector and heir to the Mellon banking fortune.

Mr. Mellon died in 1999 at 91. Soon after, Mrs. Mellon’s daughter, Eliza, from her first marriage, was hit by a car and left a quadriplegic. She died in 2008. The next year, Robert Isabell, Mrs. Mellon’s frequent companion and a prominent events planner, died; she buried him on her property.

She only recently planned her own funeral, she told James Reginato, a writer for Vanity Fair magazine.

Mrs. Mellon still pays a great deal of attention to her surroundings, friends say. She likes to decorate. And redecorate.

“She once built a pool in Osterville,” on Cape Cod, said David Patrick Columbia, editor of NewYorkSocialDiary.com, a blog that reports on the city’s social scene, of which Mrs. Mellon was once a part. “When it was finished, she decided the deep end was on the wrong side and so she had them take it out and put in a new one.”

Her taste runs to the understated, he said. “When you saw her dress, she didn’t look extraordinary but she did look perfect.”

Mario Buatta, a New York decorator called “The Prince of Chintz,” recalled her low-key style. “I ran into her once, and she was wearing a plain raincoat and a simple rain hat,” he said.

But she can be extravagantly generous to people she likes, as Mr. Edwards would discover.

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Finding on Dialects Casts New Light on the Origins of the Japanese People

The result provides support for a wider picture, controversial among linguists, that the distribution of many language families today reflects the spread of agriculture in the distant past when farming populations, carrying their languages with them, grew in numbers and expanded at the expense of hunter-gatherers. Under this theory, the Indo-European family of languages, which includes English, was spread by the first farmers who expanded into Europe from the Middle East some 8,000 years ago, largely replacing the existing population of hunter-gatherers.

In the case of Japan, archaeologists have found evidence for two waves of migrants, a hunter-gatherer people who created the Jomon culture and wet rice farmers who left remains known as the Yayoi culture.

The Jomon people arrived in Japan before the end of the last ice age, via land bridges that joined Japan to Asia’s mainland. They fended off invaders until about 2,400 years ago when the wet rice agriculture developed in southern China was adapted to Korea’s colder climate.

Several languages seem to have been spoken on the Korean Peninsula at this time, and that of the Yayoi people is unknown. The work of two researchers at the University of Tokyo, Sean Lee and Toshikazu Hasegawa, now suggests that the origin of Japonic — the language family that includes Japanese and Ryukyuan, spoken in the Ryukyu island chain south of Japan — coincides with the arrival of the Yayoi.

The finding, if confirmed, indicates that the Yayoi people took Japonic to Japan, but leaves unresolved the question of where in Asia the Yayoi culture or Japonic language originated before arriving in the Korean Peninsula.

Mr. Lee is a graduate student studying language and the mind, not a historical linguist. He has used a statistical tree-drawing method that other biologists have applied successfully to language origins, despite some linguists’ skepticism. The method, called Bayesian phylogeny, depends on having a computer draw a large number of possible trees and sampling them to find the most probable. Each language is represented by a 200-word vocabulary composed of words known to change very slowly.

If any fork in the tree can be linked to a historical event, all the other branch points can be dated. In this case, Mr. Lee knew dates for Old Japanese, Middle Japanese, and the split between the Kyoto and Tokyo dialects that began in 1603 A.D. when the capital was moved from Kyoto to Edo, the early name for Tokyo.

Mr. Lee reasoned that Japanese would have originated with the Jomon if the root of the tree turned out to be very ancient, but with the Yayoi culture if recent. The computer’s date of 2,182 years ago for the origin of the tree fits reasonably well with the archaeological dates for the Yayoi culture, he reported Tuesday in The Proceedings of the Royal Society.

John B. Whitman, an expert on Japanese linguistics who works at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, in Tokyo, and at Cornell University, called the new finding “solid and reasonable,” although the date of the Yayoi culture, he said, has now been pushed back to around 3,000 years after a recalibration of radiocarbon dates. That would open an 800-year gap with Mr. Lee’s date but not necessarily change his conclusion.

The question of Japanese origins has had political consequences, with the link to the Yayoi culture having been invoked to justify the annexation of Korea and Manchuria before World War II. After the war, the link with the Jomon culture was emphasized.

Quentin Atkinson, an expert on language phylogeny at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, said that Mr. Lee’s time scale was plausible but that if Japonic had spread through an agriculturally driven population expansion, his language tree should be much bushier at its root. Mr. Lee said that such earlier versions of Japanese might have disappeared when the island was politically unified about 1,000 years ago.

Genetic studies have suggested interbreeding between the Yayoi and Jomon people, with the Jomon contribution to modern Japanese being as much as 40 percent. Apparently the Yayoi language prevailed, along with the agricultural technology.

 

Finding on Dialects Casts New Light on the Origins of the Japanese People

Researchers studying the various dialects of Japanese have concluded that all are descended from a founding language taken to the Japanese islands about 2,200 years ago. The finding sheds new light on the origin of the Japanese people, suggesting that their language is descended from that of the rice-growing farmers who arrived in Japan from the Korean Peninsula, and not from the hunter-gatherers who first inhabited the islands some 30,000 years ago.

The result provides support for a wider picture, controversial among linguists, that the distribution of many language families today reflects the spread of agriculture in the distant past when farming populations, carrying their languages with them, grew in numbers and expanded at the expense of hunter-gatherers. Under this theory, the Indo-European family of languages, which includes English, was spread by the first farmers who expanded into Europe from the Middle East some 8,000 years ago, largely replacing the existing population of hunter-gatherers.

In the case of Japan, archaeologists have found evidence for two waves of migrants, a hunter-gatherer people who created the Jomon culture and wet rice farmers who left remains known as the Yayoi culture.

The Jomon people arrived in Japan before the end of the last ice age, via land bridges that joined Japan to Asia’s mainland. They fended off invaders until about 2,400 years ago when the wet rice agriculture developed in southern China was adapted to Korea’s colder climate.

Several languages seem to have been spoken on the Korean Peninsula at this time, and that of the Yayoi people is unknown. The work of two researchers at the University of Tokyo, Sean Lee and Toshikazu Hasegawa, now suggests that the origin of Japonic — the language family that includes Japanese and Ryukyuan, spoken in the Ryukyu island chain south of Japan — coincides with the arrival of the Yayoi.

The finding, if confirmed, indicates that the Yayoi people took Japonic to Japan, but leaves unresolved the question of where in Asia the Yayoi culture or Japonic language originated before arriving in the Korean Peninsula.

Mr. Lee is a graduate student studying language and the mind, not a historical linguist. He has used a statistical tree-drawing method that other biologists have applied successfully to language origins, despite some linguists’ skepticism. The method, called Bayesian phylogeny, depends on having a computer draw a large number of possible trees and sampling them to find the most probable. Each language is represented by a 200-word vocabulary composed of words known to change very slowly.

If any fork in the tree can be linked to a historical event, all the other branch points can be dated. In this case, Mr. Lee knew dates for Old Japanese, Middle Japanese, and the split between the Kyoto and Tokyo dialects that began in 1603 A.D. when the capital was moved from Kyoto to Edo, the early name for Tokyo.

Mr. Lee reasoned that Japanese would have originated with the Jomon if the root of the tree turned out to be very ancient, but with the Yayoi culture if recent. The computer’s date of 2,182 years ago for the origin of the tree fits reasonably well with the archaeological dates for the Yayoi culture, he reported Tuesday in The Proceedings of the Royal Society.

John B. Whitman, an expert on Japanese linguistics who works at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, in Tokyo, and at Cornell University, called the new finding “solid and reasonable,” although the date of the Yayoi culture, he said, has now been pushed back to around 3,000 years after a recalibration of radiocarbon dates. That would open an 800-year gap with Mr. Lee’s date but not necessarily change his conclusion.

The question of Japanese origins has had political consequences, with the link to the Yayoi culture having been invoked to justify the annexation of Korea and Manchuria before World War II. After the war, the link with the Jomon culture was emphasized.

Quentin Atkinson, an expert on language phylogeny at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, said that Mr. Lee’s time scale was plausible but that if Japonic had spread through an agriculturally driven population expansion, his language tree should be much bushier at its root. Mr. Lee said that such earlier versions of Japanese might have disappeared when the island was politically unified about 1,000 years ago.

Genetic studies have suggested interbreeding between the Yayoi and Jomon people, with the Jomon contribution to modern Japanese being as much as 40 percent. Apparently the Yayoi language prevailed, along with the agricultural technology.

 

Review Casts More Doubts on a Lung Cancer Study

 

But the doctors who conducted a controversial, widely publicized lung cancer study involving more than 50,000 patients at numerous hospitals were unable to locate 90 percent of the consent forms, according to a confidential review provided to The New York Times.

The finding casts further doubt on a clinical trial that made headlines in 2006 when it concluded that fully 80 percent of lung cancer deaths could be prevented through wide use of CT scans.

That trial, led by Dr. Claudia I. Henschke at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, drew sharp criticism from skeptics of cancer screening; the criticism intensified when The Times reported in March 2008 that the research was being financed in part by $3.6 million in grants from the parent company of the Liggett Group, a cigarette maker.

The confidential report on patient consent, dated Oct. 7, 2008, recommended that the trial be stopped. But it continues to this day, although not at Weill Cornell.

Several ethicists said the hospital was legally required to disclose the ethical problems documented by the secret review. That has not happened either.

The confidential report was commissioned by Weill Cornell after The Times’s 2008 article and other revelations about the study in the newsletter The Cancer Letter. The hospital hired four prominent professors from other universities to undertake an independent review of Dr. Henschke’s research, known as the International Early Lung Cancer Action Program, or I-Elcap.

In their report, the reviewers scolded Weill Cornell administrators for failing to supervise the research more closely, “especially knowing that scientific controversy has surrounded I-Elcap almost from its inception.”

One reviewer, Dr. David P. Carbone, a professor of medicine and cancer biology at Vanderbilt, said in an interview that he and the other reviewers never found out “whether these consents were obtained and lost or whether they weren’t obtained at all.”

He said that Dr. Henschke acted with the best of intentions, “but there’s no way for me to justify any of the problems” documented by the group’s review.

Dr. Henschke, who has since left Weill Cornell for Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, declined to respond to the findings of the 2008 review, saying it was confidential. But in an e-mail, she said the responsibility for keeping track of consent forms lay with all the hospitals where the experiments were done.

“I-Elcap is a non-federally funded academic consortium of independent, autonomous sites that share certain data,” she wrote.? “Accountability and responsibility for human protection lie at the local level.”

But Dr. Henschke’s research has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, and federal rules governing research conducted at multiple sites have long required that the coordinating center either collect copies of patient consent forms or ensure that they are being kept appropriately.

“The responsible conduct of a study requires that informed consent documents be kept on file,” said Dr. P. Pearl O’Rourke, director of human research affairs at Partners HealthCare, part of Harvard University. “There should be a system so that every consent form can be found no matter if individuals were enrolled at a single site or multiple sites.”

John D. Rodgers, a spokesman for Weill Cornell, wrote in an e-mail that the medical school followed federal research regulations “and there were no issues regarding the safety of the research subjects.”

Dr. Bruce A. Chabner, director of clinical research at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and editor in chief of The Oncologist journal, said he would ask Weill Cornell for an explanation of the problems outlined in the 2008 scientific review, as well as a follow-up to the report. His journal has published research by Dr. Henschke, and “if we find there was no informed consent for those patients, the paper would have to retracted,” he said.

The American Cancer Society helped finance Dr. Henschke’s research, and some of her work was published in cancer journals owned by the society. Dr. Otis W. Brawley, the society’s chief medical officer, said any study underwritten by the organization must conform to federal research rules, including those that require that problems with informed consent be reported to federal science agencies.

He added that the society’s journals might have to correct or retract any study that proved unable to document that patients had given informed consent. “But I don’t want to prejudge the case,” Dr. Brawley said.

In November, a huge federal study found that annual CT scans of current and former heavy smokers reduced their risk of death from lung cancer by 20 percent and, even more surprising, seemed to reduce the risks of death from other causes as well.

Although the scale of the benefit was substantially less than Dr. Henschke claimed her research showed, the federal study was widely interpreted as confirming her longtime contention that CT screening can save lives from lung cancer, which kills more than 150,000 people each year in the United States. Most patients discover their disease too late for treatment, and 85 percent die from it.

 

Review Casts More Doubts on a Lung Cancer Study

But the doctors who conducted a controversial, widely publicized lung cancer study involving more than 50,000 patients at numerous hospitals were unable to locate 90 percent of the consent forms, according to a confidential review provided to The New York Times.

The finding casts further doubt on a clinical trial that made headlines in 2006 when it concluded that fully 80 percent of lung cancer deaths could be prevented through wide use of CT scans.

That trial, led by Dr. Claudia I. Henschke at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, drew sharp criticism from skeptics of cancer screening; the criticism intensified when The Times reported in March 2008 that the research was being financed in part by $3.6 million in grants from the parent company of the Liggett Group, a cigarette maker.

The confidential report on patient consent, dated Oct. 7, 2008, recommended that the trial be stopped. But it continues to this day, although not at Weill Cornell.

Several ethicists said the hospital was legally required to disclose the ethical problems documented by the secret review. That has not happened either.

The confidential report was commissioned by Weill Cornell after The Times’s 2008 article and other revelations about the study in the newsletter The Cancer Letter. The hospital hired four prominent professors from other universities to undertake an independent review of Dr. Henschke’s research, known as the International Early Lung Cancer Action Program, or I-Elcap.

In their report, the reviewers scolded Weill Cornell administrators for failing to supervise the research more closely, “especially knowing that scientific controversy has surrounded I-Elcap almost from its inception.”

One reviewer, Dr. David P. Carbone, a professor of medicine and cancer biology at Vanderbilt, said in an interview that he and the other reviewers never found out “whether these consents were obtained and lost or whether they weren’t obtained at all.”

He said that Dr. Henschke acted with the best of intentions, “but there’s no way for me to justify any of the problems” documented by the group’s review.

Dr. Henschke, who has since left Weill Cornell for Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, declined to respond to the findings of the 2008 review, saying it was confidential. But in an e-mail, she said the responsibility for keeping track of consent forms lay with all the hospitals where the experiments were done.

“I-Elcap is a non-federally funded academic consortium of independent, autonomous sites that share certain data,” she wrote.? “Accountability and responsibility for human protection lie at the local level.”

But Dr. Henschke’s research has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, and federal rules governing research conducted at multiple sites have long required that the coordinating center either collect copies of patient consent forms or ensure that they are being kept appropriately.

“The responsible conduct of a study requires that informed consent documents be kept on file,” said Dr. P. Pearl O’Rourke, director of human research affairs at Partners HealthCare, part of Harvard University. “There should be a system so that every consent form can be found no matter if individuals were enrolled at a single site or multiple sites.”

John D. Rodgers, a spokesman for Weill Cornell, wrote in an e-mail that the medical school followed federal research regulations “and there were no issues regarding the safety of the research subjects.”

Dr. Bruce A. Chabner, director of clinical research at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and editor in chief of The Oncologist journal, said he would ask Weill Cornell for an explanation of the problems outlined in the 2008 scientific review, as well as a follow-up to the report. His journal has published research by Dr. Henschke, and “if we find there was no informed consent for those patients, the paper would have to retracted,” he said.

The American Cancer Society helped finance Dr. Henschke’s research, and some of her work was published in cancer journals owned by the society. Dr. Otis W. Brawley, the society’s chief medical officer, said any study underwritten by the organization must conform to federal research rules, including those that require that problems with informed consent be reported to federal science agencies.

He added that the society’s journals might have to correct or retract any study that proved unable to document that patients had given informed consent. “But I don’t want to prejudge the case,” Dr. Brawley said.

In November, a huge federal study found that annual CT scans of current and former heavy smokers reduced their risk of death from lung cancer by 20 percent and, even more surprising, seemed to reduce the risks of death from other causes as well.

Although the scale of the benefit was substantially less than Dr. Henschke claimed her research showed, the federal study was widely interpreted as confirming her longtime contention that CT screening can save lives from lung cancer, which kills more than 150,000 people each year in the United States. Most patients discover their disease too late for treatment, and 85 percent die from it.

 

Review Casts More Doubts on a Lung Cancer Study

But the doctors who conducted a controversial, widely publicized lung cancer study involving more than 50,000 patients at numerous hospitals were unable to locate 90 percent of the consent forms, according to a confidential review provided to The New York Times.

The finding casts further doubt on a clinical trial that made headlines in 2006 when it concluded that fully 80 percent of lung cancer deaths could be prevented through wide use of CT scans.

That trial, led by Dr. Claudia I. Henschke at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, drew sharp criticism from skeptics of cancer screening; the criticism intensified when The Times reported in March 2008 that the research was being financed in part by $3.6 million in grants from the parent company of the Liggett Group, a cigarette maker.

The confidential report on patient consent, dated Oct. 7, 2008, recommended that the trial be stopped. But it continues to this day, although not at Weill Cornell.

Several ethicists said the hospital was legally required to disclose the ethical problems documented by the secret review. That has not happened either.

The confidential report was commissioned by Weill Cornell after The Times’s 2008 article and other revelations about the study in the newsletter The Cancer Letter. The hospital hired four prominent professors from other universities to undertake an independent review of Dr. Henschke’s research, known as the International Early Lung Cancer Action Program, or I-Elcap.

In their report, the reviewers scolded Weill Cornell administrators for failing to supervise the research more closely, “especially knowing that scientific controversy has surrounded I-Elcap almost from its inception.”

One reviewer, Dr. David P. Carbone, a professor of medicine and cancer biology at Vanderbilt, said in an interview that he and the other reviewers never found out “whether these consents were obtained and lost or whether they weren’t obtained at all.”

He said that Dr. Henschke acted with the best of intentions, “but there’s no way for me to justify any of the problems” documented by the group’s review.

Dr. Henschke, who has since left Weill Cornell for Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, declined to respond to the findings of the 2008 review, saying it was confidential. But in an e-mail, she said the responsibility for keeping track of consent forms lay with all the hospitals where the experiments were done.

“I-Elcap is a non-federally funded academic consortium of independent, autonomous sites that share certain data,” she wrote.? “Accountability and responsibility for human protection lie at the local level.”

But Dr. Henschke’s research has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, and federal rules governing research conducted at multiple sites have long required that the coordinating center either collect copies of patient consent forms or ensure that they are being kept appropriately.

“The responsible conduct of a study requires that informed consent documents be kept on file,” said Dr. P. Pearl O’Rourke, director of human research affairs at Partners HealthCare, part of Harvard University. “There should be a system so that every consent form can be found no matter if individuals were enrolled at a single site or multiple sites.”

John D. Rodgers, a spokesman for Weill Cornell, wrote in an e-mail that the medical school followed federal research regulations “and there were no issues regarding the safety of the research subjects.”

Dr. Bruce A. Chabner, director of clinical research at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and editor in chief of The Oncologist journal, said he would ask Weill Cornell for an explanation of the problems outlined in the 2008 scientific review, as well as a follow-up to the report. His journal has published research by Dr. Henschke, and “if we find there was no informed consent for those patients, the paper would have to retracted,” he said.

The American Cancer Society helped finance Dr. Henschke’s research, and some of her work was published in cancer journals owned by the society. Dr. Otis W. Brawley, the society’s chief medical officer, said any study underwritten by the organization must conform to federal research rules, including those that require that problems with informed consent be reported to federal science agencies.

He added that the society’s journals might have to correct or retract any study that proved unable to document that patients had given informed consent. “But I don’t want to prejudge the case,” Dr. Brawley said.

In November, a huge federal study found that annual CT scans of current and former heavy smokers reduced their risk of death from lung cancer by 20 percent and, even more surprising, seemed to reduce the risks of death from other causes as well.

Although the scale of the benefit was substantially less than Dr. Henschke claimed her research showed, the federal study was widely interpreted as confirming her longtime contention that CT screening can save lives from lung cancer, which kills more than 150,000 people each year in the United States. Most patients discover their disease too late for treatment, and 85 percent die from it.