Biologist behind groundbreaking Beothuk DNA study fighting ethics complaint
The researcher who penned a breakthrough study earlier this year detailing DNA links between Beothuk people and contemporary Indigenous ones is now facing an ethics complaint about it.
The complaint against Steve Carr, a biology professor at Memorial University, comes from the school's Office of the Vice-President for Research.
Carr told CBC he did nothing wrong, and the university has no right to complain since the study wasn't under its jurisdiction. He said he still hasn't been told the specifics of the allegation, lodged with the province's Health Research Ethics Board.
"When somebody tells me what I'm supposed to have done, then I can respond to it," Carr told Newfoundland Morning. "I haven't done anything."
Memorial University declined to comment on the complaint against Carr.
The study made international news in April when Carr released his paper that traced contemporary mitochondrial DNA back to Newfoundland's Beothuk people.
One living person in Tennessee even proved to be an exact genetic match to Nonosabasut, one of the last remaining Beothuk, who was killed by the English settler John Peyton Jr in 1819.
The study was not conducted through Memorial University. Carr's company, Terra Nova Genomics, carried it out in partnership with the Miawpukek First Nation. a Mi'kmaq band on the south coast of Newfoundland.
The First Nation has long said its members are related to the Beothuk, and enlisted Carr to conduct research to prove the connection.
Two arguments against complaint
Part of the reason Carr cannot understand the ethics complaint is that the first phase of the project — which resulted in April's paper — did not involve any human subjects.
He simply took the few known DNA profiles of Beothuk people and ran it against an open-source database of genetic samples known as GenBank.
This type of study is known as a meta analysis, and Carr said it doesn't require approval from the Health Research Ethics Board.
"Under the ethics rules which we operate on, a meta analysis is not something that requires ethics approval," he said.
The other reason he can't understand the complaint is that the study was commissioned by the Miawpukek First Nation, which oversees its own research projects independent of provincial authorities.
Miawpukek Chief Mi'sel Joe has written a letter to Memorial University President Vianne Timmons, saying the study was undertaken under the authority and with the oversight of his band's research department.
"That [study] was at the initiative, complete cooperation and ethics and research approval by the Miawpukek First Nation acting as a sovereign First Nation," Carr told CBC's Newfoundland Morning.
As for how the complaint affects Carr's work at Memorial University — knowing a research colleague is the one who complained — he said so far it has been a struggle.
He said there's been complaints about his research with the Miawpukek First Nation before, but it hasn't stopped his work before and it won't stop things moving forward.
The next phase is to take samples from members of the First Nation and compare it to known Beothuk profiles. Carr said that work is moving forward, with insistence from the chief, regardless of the current complaint.
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