The American Diabetes Association Had Police Remove the Editor of Its Own Journal. Then It Refused to Print His Reply.

In New Orleans on June 5, at the American Diabetes Association’s 86th Scientific Sessions, state police escorted a man out of the convention center for handing out a piece of paper. The paper was an editorial. The man was Steven Kahn, and the editorial had run in Diabetes Care, the ADA’s own flagship journal, of which Kahn happens to be the editor-in-chief. A guard, by one co-author’s account, aggressively yanked the copies away. Kahn was told he was trespassing. He has belonged to the society for nearly four decades.

He was not alone. Five researchers were removed in all, a group that included a former ADA president, Desmond Schatz, and two long-tenured University of Washington and University of Minnesota diabetes scientists. Their offense, as the organization would later frame it, was a failure to “conduct themselves in a professional and respectful manner,” and a threat to the ADA’s obligation to maintain a strictly nonpartisan environment at its events. What they had actually done was distribute copies of an essay that the society itself had published, in the society’s own pages, weeks earlier.

The essay ran in the June issue of Diabetes Care under a title that did not mince words: “Misguided brushes of a pen continue to dismantle and destroy biomedical research in the United States.” It argued that the current administration’s proposal to cut the National Institutes of Health by roughly $5 billion, together with a collapse in new grant opportunities, would gut diabetes research and the labs, and the patients, that depend on it. You do not have to agree with a word of it to notice the problem. An editorial cleared a journal’s review, appeared in that journal, and then a guard pulled it from the hands of the people who wrote it while state police walked them out, inside the tent of the organization that printed it.

The society’s discomfort with its own product ran deeper than the convention floor. Kahn says the ADA quietly attached two additional disclaimers to his editorial after he had approved the final proof, distancing itself from an opinion it had agreed to publish. The piece already carried a prominent disclaimer, top and bottom, stating the views were the authors’ and not the ADA’s. That was not enough. The extra language, in Kahn’s reading, was less about clarity than cover. “What all it is, in my mind, is a CYA for the Trump administration,” he said.

There is a version of this story where an institution overreacts once, under the pressure of a live event, and then walks it back. For a moment it looked like that version. The blowback was immediate: more than 6,500 people signed an open letter, two ADA leaders resigned, including the chair who had planned the meeting, and CEO Charles Henderson issued a video apology and promised an internal review. Henderson said the organization would keep advocating for robust NIH funding. It looked like an institution catching itself.

Then July came, and the correction did not hold.

Kahn and his colleagues assembled a collection for Diabetes Care: one editorial and seven accompanying opinion pieces reckoning with what had happened in New Orleans and what it meant for the society’s independence. They handed the whole package to the ADA in advance, with the ordinary courtesy of scholarly publishing: print your response alongside ours, at the same time, and let readers weigh both. The society had every tool a publisher could want to answer speech with more speech. It used none of them. The ADA declined to publish the collection in the journal it owns. The authors posted it to a preprint server instead, under the flat title “Community Voices: On the Events of the American Diabetes Association 86th Scientific Sessions.”

“What you’re seeing here is pure censorship,” Kahn said this week. He had already put the earlier version more precisely: an organization he had served for forty years had, in his words, effectively disregarded his First Amendment rights. It is his characterization, made against a private society, not a court’s finding. It is also not hard to see what he means.

Strip away the funding politics, which the reader is free to sort out on their own terms, and what remains is a professional society doing the two things a society that trusted its own members would never need to do. It called the police on its editor. Then it refused to print the reply.

The tell is in the sequencing. The June ejection can be filed under panic, a security posture that got away from the people running it. The July refusal cannot. That was a deliberation, conducted in calm offices weeks after the apology, with the open letter and the resignations already on the record, and the answer the organization arrived at was to keep a debate about itself out of its own pages. The apology was the performance. The refusal to publish was the policy.

This is the class of institution that spent the last several years lecturing everyone else about the sanctity of expertise and the danger of suppressing inconvenient information. Handed a genuine test of that principle, on its own turf, about its own conduct, it reached first for uniformed officers and then for the delete key. An organization that will confiscate an editorial from the man who edits its journal, and then refuse to print eight more, is telling you exactly whose comfort it is built to protect. It is not the patient with diabetes, whose care depends on a research pipeline that can argue honestly about its own money and the pressure on it.

Kahn has now published his account of all of it on a server the ADA does not control, which is, in the end, the only reason you get to read it at all.

Sources

1. The Scientist – Police Removed Prominent Scientists from the ADA Meeting. Researchers Respond
2. The American Prospect – Appeasing Trump Is a Futile Sugar High
3. FIRE – American Diabetes Association ejects researchers from conference for sharing editorial from its own journal
4. Celine Gounder – A Diabetes Society Had Police Remove the Editor of Its Own Journal. Then It Apologized.
5. Zenodo – Community Voices: On the Events of the American Diabetes Association 86th Scientific Sessions
6. Inside Higher Ed – Police Remove Diabetes Researchers From Conference
7. Bloomberg – Conference Ejects Scientists Sharing Anti-Trump Editorial
8. MedPage Today – ‘What You’re Seeing Here Is Pure Censorship’: What We Heard This Week