| I’m still using the term Corrigendum all wrong. I picked it facetiously, after the recent post about the Risperdone augmentation studies where this five dollar word for benign printing errors was used to correct things that may well have been deliberate ommission or mis-statement – covering one’s tracks. I’m misusing it by proxy to say that I think that Dr. McGorry should’ve mentioned the application for the patents on ω-3 Fatty Acids to prevent or treat psychosis himself, no matter what it means [rather than leaving some old psychiatrist on a mountain across the world trying to figure it out]. It just doesn’t look good. But a commenter seems to have cleared up at least some of the confusion I had in Corrigendum I. |
But I’m not sure I totally agree with the second part, "does not present any conflict of interest." We’ve been through that here in the US with Dr. Schatzberg’s Mifepristone. The patent was assigned to Stanford, but there was an internal agreement that cut in Dr. Schatzberg and his private company. I’m not saying that Dr. McGorry and Orygen have such an arrangement, but, after all, he is their Executive Director, so we’d like to know about that. But it is comforting to know it’s not a personal patent.
The requirements of the law and scientific ethic differ substantively. In the Law, a person is "innocent until proven guilty." That’s as it should be. In the world of science, any undeclared potential conflict of interest is in the the "guilty until proven innocent" category, contingent on a suitable explanation or declaration. So if you work for or are getting paid by a company whose drug is used in your study, that fact needs to be declared. That doesn’t remove a suspicion of bias, but it does allow the rest of us to consider it in our evaluations of a grant request, an ethics hearing, an article, a report, or a program. The standard is transparency
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