"In the ghost management of medical research by pharmaceutical companies, we have a novel model of science. This is corporate science, done by many hidden workers, performed for marketing purposes, and drawing its authority from traditional academic science. The high commercial stakes mean that all of the parties connected with this new science can find reasons or be induced to participate, support, and steadily normalize it. It is likely here to stay for a while."
Sergio Sismondo
I may claim the right to be boring, but I’m sure not bored with this topic of industry invading academic medicine and the medical literature. As a late-comer, I still happen on to unexplored corners all the time that open up a whole new cache of things to think about. That term, ghost management, is one of those unexplored corners. Without knowing it exactly, I’ve been running into an example [Vortioxetine] of publication planning for a while now. There’s a ghost behind this machine:
And so to the work of Canadian Philosopher/Sociologist Sergio Sismondo who has enough publications on this topic to be named an honorary KOL himself. Here’s a long one that can be read full text on the the Internet – Ghosts in the Machine 2009. His work is one of those 
unexplored corners that occupied my Sunday.
I once had a friend who was working on his PhD thesis on Husserl at Duke. One night, he left Durham and drove to Memphis and enrolled in Medical School, never looking back. He later said something like, "That night, I started to finally ‘get it.’ And I realized that if I continued in philosophy and ‘got it’ much more, I’d be too depressed to ever get any sleep." Sismundo’s work has some of that flavor. His command of ghost management, publication planning, and the stealth goings on in the pharmaceutical industry is encyclopedic and illuminating, but I wonder how he sleeps at night…
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.