1 Boring Old Man

^{But the part that gets to me is that the Academic Institutions are on the wrong side of this battle. "During the public comment period last summer, the Association of American Universities and the AAMC submitted a joint statement saying: ‘There are serious and reasonable concerns among our members that the Web posting will be of little practical value to the public and, without context for the information, could lead to confusion rather than clarity regarding financial conflicts of interest and how they are managed.’" There’s something terribly wrong about that alignment. That’s something that I just don’t understand. My notion of academia must be even more naive than I know. I guess it’s time for some [potentially disillusioning] research…}

With Big Pharma on campus, who is looking after the public interest?
by Alison Bass
August 3, 2011

^{Medicare and social services for vulnerable Americans are not the only programs on the chopping block with Washington’s deal to raise the debt ceiling and cut trillions of dollars in government spending. Looming ahead may be deep cuts in funding for medical and science research, and that raises the specter of growing collaboration between academic centers and industry, including pharmaceutical and medical device companies… There may be some beneficial outcomes to these partnerships in the development of drugs to treat intractable diseases. But what concerns many is this: how can institutions that are increasingly reliant on funding from private companies do an adequate job of policing conflicts of interest among their own faculty? It’s akin to having the fox guard the chicken coop.}

^{"I’m not sure that universities can police conflicts of interest when they become so reliant on [private sector] funding," said Peter Conrad, Harry Coplan Professor of Social Sciences at Brandeis University and author of The Medicalization of Society. According to Conrad and others, academic centers are already doing a poor job of enforcing their own conflicts of interest policies…  Conrad believes such conflicts of interest will only worsen in the coming years as federal research money becomes scarcer and universities turn to industry to keep their science labs humming.  "I think this is just the beginning of the privatization of research," he says. "It’s representative of the tilt in society towards business interests over public interests"…}

^{Indeed, university and industry lobbyists have already succeeded in convincing the federal government to drop a key provision in the proposed new NIH guidelines for conflicts of interest among federally-funded researchers. According to Nature, a cornerstone of the new guidelines — a series of publicly accessible websites detailing financial conflicts among academic researchers — has now been dropped… My guess is that universities didn’t want that much transparency out of fear it might embarrass their star faculty rainmakers and stifle lucrative partnerships with industry. After all, why bite the hand that feeds you?}

I don’t say that to be sarcastic or funny. There’s a fever pitch about research as if it’s a commodity that must be continuously generated, particularly psychopharmacological research. Frankly, I think the urgency is generated by the pharmaceutical industry in order to get new drugs to replace the ones that go out of patent – the metaphorical pipeline we read so much about. If Universities really are driven by the forces Alison Bass hypothesizes [and I expect she’s right on target], they’re making the very Faustian bargain we’ve all lamented, and they have lost the right to weigh in on the decisions.

^{‘The websites don’t appear out of nowhere,’ says Heather Pierce, senior director of science policy at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) in Washington DC. They would ‘require employees to not only create the website but to pull the information, review it, and make sure it is up to date and accurate’. That is not the only objection from the powerful academic lobbies. During the public comment period last summer, the Association of American Universities and the AAMC submitted a joint statement saying: ‘There are serious and reasonable concerns among our members that the Web posting will be of little practical value to the public and, without context for the information, could lead to confusion rather than clarity regarding financial conflicts of interest and how they are managed.’}