The overwhelming majority of the "authors" of the articles about BANS were not authors at all. In fact, most of the "authors" never even read the article attributed to them, let alone wrote a single syllable of it. One of us (ABA) "read out" virtually every melanoma that was included in the database of the Melanoma Cooperative Group at New York University between the years 1973 and 1993, and was privy to the way in which authorship came to be awarded. The leader of the group (AWK) sent each manuscript generated by a very few junior members of it (there were many scores of such articles during that 20 year period) to each member of the group (there were more than two score in it), asking whether that particular member would like to be an author. If the answer was "Yes," that person need only check the box that indicated affirmation.

During that 20 year period, never once did ABA agree to be an author of a single article that emanated from the Melanoma Corporative Group at NYU, notwithstanding the fact that he was responsible ultimately for every diagnosis histopathologically on which those articles were based. His revulsion at the manner in which authorship was determined was published in an editorial that appeared in The American Journal of Dermatopathology (Volume 4, Number 5, pages 387–389) for 1982 under the title " The computer et al" (see addendum 1). Drs. Day, Kopf, and Rigel were invited to respond, but only the latter two did that (see addendum 2). The editorial and the response are published again here with permission of the current editor of The American Journal of Dermatopathology, Dr. Philip LeBoit.

Dr. Day, then a resident in dermatology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, was turning out articles in large numbers, among them ones pertinent to BANS (he was an author of 40 articles in toto during the three year span of his residency) and all of that work came to the same end as did BANS, that is, naught. It seemed in those days that Dr. Day was embarked fervently on an academic career. Since he left Harvard in 1983, his muse seems to have deserted him. In the ensuing 20 years he has published a total of 32 articles, most of which have been given to matters surgical, he having taken a fellowship in Mohs microsurgery in 1984 under Dr. Perry Robins at New York University. He now does Mohs micrographic surgery in San Antonio, Texas.

The review process for articles submitted to medical journals, particularly in fields like dermatology, pathology, and surgery, is flawed beyond description and seemingly beyond redemption, in part because it is predicated on the ill-advised concept of "peer review." The reviewers of the works about BANS were deemed by editors of journals to be peers of the "authors" of the works themselves and the result is that all of those articles were accepted for publication in so-called respectable peer-reviewed journals, ones given the household seal of approval by Index Medicus. And to compound the indecency of such a woefully flawed process, there is the clout exerted by Ivy League institutions like Harvard (the institution which not only bears chief responsibility for BANS, but for all the other detritus strewn about along with its partner in a tag team, the University of Pennsylvania, concerning issues like melanocytic dysplasia, the dysplastic nevus ("familial" and "sporadic"), the dysplastic nevus syndrome, the epidemic of melanoma, etc., etc., etc.). Had BANS been a mere dropping of the University of Mississippi or the University of South Dakota, rather than of Harvard and New York University, never would it have been published in a major medical journal and probably would have ended up in a throw-away, which, at best, it deserved. Instead, BANS became a household word in dermatology—at least for four years. But BANS was not the first myth to be propagated by self promoting dermatologists and pathologists who used "pigmented lesions" and clinics devoted to them as vehicles for their own advancement. One need only recall the nonsense served up in the past 50 years about subjects like junctional activity and activated junctional nevus, atypical melanocytic hyperplasia, mild, moderate, and severe dysplasia, wide and deep excision for primary cutaneous melanoma, elective lymph node dissection, the "histogenetic" classification of melanoma, lentigo maligna as a precursor of melanoma, radial vs. vertical growth phases of melanoma, melanocytic neoplasms with architectural disorder, melanocytic neoplasms of uncertain biologic potential, tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), minimal deviation melanoma, borderline melanoma, nevoid melanoma, pagetoid melanocytic proliferation—and more nonsense keeps coming. Sentinel node biopsy is now the rage, advocates of it, ignorant of rudimentary principles that guide behavior of metastasis, leading a stampede to make that procedure "standard of care," when, in actuality, it is nothing other than another fraud perpetrated on an unsuspecting and defenseless public, every member of which is a patient potentially.