In 2005, FAN uncovered documents indicating that Dr. Chester Douglass, a Colgate-affiliated dental researcher at Harvard Dental School had suppressed and misrepresented the results of his NIH-funded study on fluoride and bone cancer in boys. The discovery sparked national headlines, and an NIH-ethics complaint by the Environmental Working Group. Although a year-long investigation by Harvard concluded that Douglass did not “intentionally” misrepresent his data, the national scrutiny helped ensure that a Harvard doctoral dissertation linking fluoridated water to bone cancer was published in a scientific forum where it had always belonged — rather than gathering dust, as it had done for four years, in the basement of the Harvard Medical Library.