Gould’s Widow Sues Doctors

The widow of renowned Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould has sued three doctors at Harvard-affiliated hospitals for allegedly failing to detect a tumor that led to his death.

Gould, who was Agassiz professor of zoology and a professor of geology, died in May 2002, ten weeks after being diagnosed with a lung cancer that had spread to his liver, brain, and other organs. He was 60.

Gould’s wife, Rhonda Roland Shearer, now claims that the doctors­—an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and two radiologists at Brigham and Women’s Hospital—overlooked a centimeter-wide lesion in the upper lobe of his lung that later became cancerous.

According to Shearer, the lawsuit emerged after she attempted to determine why her husband’s condition was not detected sooner. When earlier this year she showed experts an X-ray of her husband’s chest taken in Feb. 2001, 13 months before the cancer was detected, the experts told her that they were able to see the lesion which led to Gould’s death.

According to the suit filed at Middlesex Superior Court in Cambridge last Friday, earlier detection of the lesion—which had tripled in size by the time it was diagnosed at New York Presbyterian Medical Center in March 2002—could have saved Gould’s life.

“We never heard about this X-ray with the one centimeter lesion [from the hospital],” Shearer said.

In a statement, the DFCI said that Shearer’s claims are “without merit.”

Dr. Robert J. Mayer, director of the DFCI Center for Gastrointestinal Oncology and Gould’s long-time principal physician, is a defendant in the suit.

“Dr. Robert Mayer cared for Professor Gould for nine years,” the DFCI statement said. “They developed a close relationship and he greatly admired and respected his patient...[T]here is simply no basis for holding him responsible for the alleged failure to diagnose that is charged here.”

According to the lawsuit, Mayer reviewed the X-ray himself in Feb. 2001 and then told Gould to “go home and relax.”

In the suit, Shearer also alleges that in the period during and after Gould’s diagnosis in New York, doctors at the Harvard-affiliated hospitals reviewed the treatment that Gould received and determined in private meetings that the Feb. 2001 X-ray did indeed show the lesion.

“Nevertheless, no disclosure was ever made to Professor Gould during his lifetime or to [Shearer] to this date by the defendants, or Dana-Farber or Brigham and Women’s, of that knowledge,” the suit reads.

“If [Mayer] would have on a personal basis contacted me or Steve when he was alive and discussed that this X-ray had been falsely vetted, then maybe other pathways would have emerged,” Shearer said.

Gould was diagnosed and cured of abdominal mesothelioma cancer in the early ’80s and had been getting regular cancer screenings at Dana-Farber.

Mayer, who is also a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, did not return requests for comment yesterday. A spokesperson for Dana-Farber said that Mayer is not commenting on the allegations.

Two radiologists, Rebecca L. Dyson and Salvatore G. Viscomi, are also named in the suit. According to Shearer’s lawyer, Alex H. MacDonald, the two doctors had also confirmed that the early X-ray with the lesion were clear of disease.

In a brief statement yesterday, Brigham and Women’s said that “the legal process is the appropriate forum to respond to the allegations.”

Dyson could not be reached yesterday and Viscomi, who was a first-year resident when the alleged negligence took place, declind to comment.

The lawsuit does not call for any specific damages, although it does state that Gould earned $300,000 a year from speaking engagements and that “a seven figure income was his norm.” The suit also states that Gould was negotiating a two million dollar book contract before his death.

Although MacDonald would not reveal the exact value of the damages, he said Shearer will seek a number in the “multi-millions of dollars.”

Shearer said any monetary award would be used to support Gould’s two adult-age sons from a previous marriage, one of whom is autistic. Other money would be used to make Gould’s writing available for free online, she said.

“My interest is really preserving Steve’s legacy,” Shearer said.

During his time at Harvard, Gould developed an evolutionary theory known as “punctuated equilibrium,” which suggests that the process of evolution is broken up by short periods of relatively rapid change and is not slow and steady as once thought.

His book “The Mismeasure of Man” won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1982.

The lawsuit is not expected to go to trial for another two years, according to MacDonald.

The trial will take place in Cambridge, with the jury drawn from Middlesex County.

—Staff writer May Habib can be reached at habib@fas.harvard.edu.