Uncommon Misconceptions: Holding Physicians Accountable for Insemination Fraud
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recently, international headlines announced that four separate OB/GYNS inseminated unsuspecting patients with their own sperm from the 1970s through early 1990s. Decades later, genetic testing would reveal their transgressions. Strangely, Drs. Norman Barwin of Ottawa, Canada; Donald Cline of Indianapolis, Indiana; Gerald Mortimer of Idaho Falls, Idaho; Ben Ramaley of Greenwich, Connecticut; and John Boyd Coates of Berlin, Vermont were not the first such offenders—in fact, according to a 1987 survey by the federal Office of Technology Assessment, approximately two percent of fertility doctors who responded had used their own sperm to inseminate patients. Cecil Jacobson was convicted of federal mail and wire fraud, travel fraud, and perjury in the mid-1990s. In Europe, Dr. Jan Karbaat (now deceased) allegedly used his own sperm to father at least twelve children (from eight to thirty-six years old, according to a 2017 New York Times article). Not surprisingly, this conduct landed all three physicians in legal hot water; Jacobson was convicted on federal charges for mail, travel, and wire fraud; Cline pled guilty to obstruction of justice for lying about his actions, and Barwin and Mortimer face civil suits.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".