AMA Fires Editor Over Publishing Sex Survey

The American Medical Assn. fired the editor of its flagship journal Thursday for publishing research in the midst of the impeachment trial showing that 60% of college students surveyed in 1991 did not think that engaging in oral sex was “having sex.”

The editor, Dr. George D. Lundberg, “inappropriately and inexcusably” interjected the Journal of the American Medical Assn. into a “major political debate that has nothing to do with science or medicine,” said AMA Executive Vice President Dr. E. Ratcliffe Anderson Jr.

The scheduled publication of the research next week in the world’s largest circulation medical journal coincides with the U.S. Senate trial on impeachment charges against President Clinton. He has been accused of perjury in part for maintaining under oath that his contact with Monica S. Lewinsky, which she said consisted of oral sex, was not “sexual relations.”

The president’s statement in a January 1998 deposition that “most ordinary Americans” would agree with that definition appears to gain some support from the survey, conducted by the renowned Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction in Bloomington, Ind.

Co-author June Machover Reinisch, former director of the institute, said in an interview Friday that the survey data shed overdue light on the presidential sex scandal that has plagued the nation for a year.

“Hundreds of lawyers and senators and congressmen have been on TV and radio expressing their absolute belief on whether Americans think [oral sex] is sex,” she said. “But they’ve had no data.”

The AMA’s sudden dismissal of Lundberg, 65, who edited the journal for 17 years and has been described as one of the most influential people in American medicine, adds a bizarre footnote to the Lewinsky matter, which surfaced in the press a year ago this weekend.

Anderson, of the AMA, said the move to fire Lundberg was not based exclusively on the sex research article. “My decision is based on seven months of observation and growing concern based on a number of issues . . . where I have lost trust and confidence in Dr. Lundberg as editor” of the journal, he told The Times.

Anderson declined to elaborate on his other concerns, but said it is appropriate for the journal to enter controversial issues if the articles “focus on science and medicine.”

Recently, the journal has been cheered and criticized in medical circles for expanding into unorthodox areas, such as an entire issue in November devoted to studies on alternative medicine. Critics said it gave the holistic medicine movement undeserved legitimacy.

Physicians and scholars expressed dismay at Lundberg’s ouster. “The journal is now taken seriously, and it wasn’t when he started,” said Dr. Marcia Angell of the New England Journal of Medicine. “He’s done a very good job.”

Some experts noted that it is difficult for prominent science and medicine journals to stay out of public controversies, given science’s expanding role in an often divisive society.

“You can hardly do a study anymore that doesn’t have social ramifications,” said Dorothy Nelkin, a New York University sociologist specializing in science. Should a medical journal like the AMA’s “avoid anything that will arouse the antiabortion movement?” she said. “Or should it ignore studies that use lab animals so as not to arouse the animal rights movement?”

Nelkin and others also stressed the journals’ obligation to the public to present data from publicly funded research projects.

The Kinsey findings presented in the AMA journal had been previously discussed at three scholarly meetings between 1994 and 1997, Reinisch said. Recently, colleagues “pressured” her, she said, to submit the findings for publication, arguing that it would be irresponsible to withhold the data.

The study of 599 students at a Midwestern university was supported partly by the federal government and a group called the Los Angeles Friends of the Kinsey Institute. The students were asked “Would you say you ‘had sex’ with someone if the most intimate behavior you engaged in was. . .” They were then presented with 11 possibilities, including deep kissing and penile-vaginal intercourse.

Sixty-three percent of the women respondents and 56% of the men said it was not sex if “a person had oral (mouth) contact with your genitals.”

Reinisch said the article’s primary purpose is to show that medical professionals who treat sexually transmitted diseases need to be more specific when asking patients about sex.

John De Lamater, a sociologist and editor of the Journal of Sex Research, said the study “reflects general scholarly interest” and filled an important gap.

Anderson, of the AMA, said he did not criticize the article’s methods or findings but said that publishing it now “seemed to be an attempt at influencing the proceeding in the Senate.”

Contrary to speculation, he did not take the action to preserve the AMA’s lobbying efforts in the nation’s capital. The association supports 13 lobbyists working to influence health care policy and other issues.

Lundberg referred calls to his attorney, William M. Walsh, who said in a statement that the AMA’s “virtually unprecedented action . . . intruded into the historically inviolable ground of editorial independence in scientific journalism.”

A White House spokesman declined to comment on the matter, saying it was an internal AMA concern.

Times research librarian Scott J. Wilson contributed to this story.