-
April 8, 2015: Implementation team formed to advance University of Minnesota human subjects research protection program [UMn Announcement]
-
April 9, 2015: The Fix is In by Leigh Turner [Commentary on the make-up of the Implementation Team]
-
April 9, 2015: Schulz stepping down as head of psychiatry [Comments from the Dean of the Medical School on the occasion of Chairman Charles Schulz’s resignation today]
Star Tribuneby JEREMY OLSONApril 9, 2015The University of Minnesota is replacing its Psychiatry Department chairman following an external review that identified subpar safety protocols in research involving human subjects and a legislative audit that chastised the department for its recruitment of a troubled man who later died by suicide in a schizophrenia drug trial. While Dr. Charles Schulz will continue clinical care and research in the department he has led since 1999, Thursday’s announcement that he is stepping down reflects a metamorphasis for a university that even a month ago was adamantly defending his department against claims of coercive recruiting of vulnerable patients into research.
“Changing one person — it’s not like switching a light switch” and problems will be fixed, said Leigh Turner, a U bioethicist who has demanded changes in administration due to problems with psychiatric research. “But there is a symbolic dimension to it. A chair is a symbolic face of a department. And this is a department that has been through a long period of controversy and questions about the conduct of its clinical trials.”
Much of the criticism has centered around the recruitment of Dan Markingson, who died by suicide in 2004 while enrolled in the university’s arm of a national study that compared the effectiveness of three antipsychotic drugs. Markingson was recruited at the time by Dr. Stephen Olson, a psychiatrist who was treating him, and running the study, and advising a judge on whether Markingson should be committed to a locked inpatient facility. Legislation following media coverage of this case in 2008 made this type of potentially coercive recruiting situation illegal…
Schulz brought prestige and a track record for amassing research grants and studying the origins of schizophrenia when he took over the department 15 years ago. He had previously been psychiatry chairman at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and chief of the schizophrenia research branch for the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health…
Schulz has, like other doctors in recent years, been scrutinized for the thousands of dollars he has received from drug companies such as AstraZeneca, the sponsor of the study in which Markingson was enrolled. Schulz’ name surfaced in documents submitted in a lawsuit against AstraZeneca, indicating that back in 2000 he made statements about the superiority of the company’s new antipsychotic drug, Seroquel, that were more favorable than research indicated…
What’s happening at this point is anticlimactic. The powers that be felt like they could just wait things out, and the Dan Markingson case would simply fade away. Throughout the whole eleven years, they treated it as a nuisance. Carl Elliot has Schulz’s only public comments on it here [back in 2010] on his blog. And looking back, this piece gives a lot of information about the case and Schulz I haven’t seen before.
Eleven years!