{"id":11894,"date":"2011-08-10T00:51:18","date_gmt":"2011-08-10T04:51:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=11894"},"modified":"2011-08-10T08:56:43","modified_gmt":"2011-08-10T12:56:43","slug":"kol-koolade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2011\/08\/10\/kol-koolade\/","title":{"rendered":"KOL Koolade&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>Earlier [<strong><u><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2011\/08\/09\/time-for-some-potentially-disillusioning-research\"><font color=\"#200020\">time for some [potentially disillusioning] research&hellip;<\/font><\/a><\/u><\/strong>] I wrote&#8230;    <\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup>But the part that gets to me is that the Academic Institutions are on the wrong side of this battle. &quot;<strong>During  the public comment period last summer, the Association of   American  Universities and the AAMC submitted a joint statement saying:   &lsquo;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.&rsquo;<\/strong>&quot; There&rsquo;s something terribly wrong about that  alignment. That&rsquo;s something that I just don&rsquo;t understand. My notion of  academia must be even more naive than I know. I guess it&rsquo;s time for some  [potentially disillusioning] research&hellip;<\/sup><\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div>&#8230;when I read that the <strong>Association of   American  Universities<\/strong> and the <strong>AAMC<\/strong> were opposing the <strong>NIH<\/strong> requiring public Internet posting of faculty Conflicts of Interest. I asked the question, and the teacher appeared:    <\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div align=\"center\"><u><strong><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/alison-bass.blogspot.com\/2011\/08\/with-big-pharma-on-campus-who-is.html\"><font color=\"#200020\">With Big Pharma on campus, who is looking after the public interest?<\/font><\/a><\/strong><\/u><br \/>      by Alison Bass<br \/>      August 3, 2011 <\/div>\n<p align=\"justify\"><sup>Medicare and social services for vulnerable Americans are not the only  programs on the chopping block with Washington&#8217;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&#8230; 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&#8217;s akin  to having the fox guard the chicken coop.<\/sup><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><sup>&quot;I&#8217;m not sure that universities can police conflicts of interest when they become so reliant on [private sector] funding,&quot; 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&#8230;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; &quot;I think this is  just the beginning of the privatization of research,&quot; he says. &quot;It&#8217;s  representative of the tilt in society towards business interests over  public interests&quot;&#8230;<\/sup><\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup>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 <u><strong><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/post-edit.g?blogID=653895891370775262&#038;postID=31178616439197208\">Nature<\/a><\/strong><\/u>,  a cornerstone of the new guidelines &mdash; a series of publicly accessible  websites detailing financial conflicts among academic researchers &mdash; has  now been dropped&#8230; <strong><font color=\"#990000\">My  guess is that universities didn&#8217;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?<\/font><\/strong><\/sup><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\">I guess I was naive. After all, I have been associated with Emory for thirty seven years, and Emory put up with Dr. Nemeroff&#8217;s antics for about half that period. So I suppose that it&#8217;s all about money. I must say that the quality of the research in psychiatry has been so low [and sometimes destructive] for such a long period that I&#8217;m not sure that anything much would be lost to scale things back several notches. Many &quot;star faculty rainmakers&quot; seem to be candidates for my &quot;fraternity of pseudoscientists&quot; anyway, at least in psychiatry. If we had a lot fewer industry funded trials and anyone missed reading them, the journals are filled to the brim with way too many already. Interested readers could just pretend they were current. It wouldn&#8217;t make a huge amount of difference in patient care.<\/div>\n<p align=\"justify\">I don&#8217;t say that to be sarcastic or funny. There&#8217;s a fever pitch about research as if it&#8217;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 &#8211; the metaphorical pipeline we read so much about. If Universities really are driven by the forces Alison Bass hypothesizes [and I expect she&#8217;s right on target], they&#8217;re making the very Faustian bargain we&#8217;ve all lamented, and they have lost the right to weigh in on the decisions.  <\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">Posting faculty Conflicts of Interest is a required reform. <strong>Nature<\/strong> reports:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup><img decoding=\"async\" width=\"130\" hspace=\"4\" border=\"0\" align=\"right\" src=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/images\/kool-ade.gif\" \/>&lsquo;The websites don&rsquo;t appear out of nowhere,&rsquo;  says Heather  Pierce, senior director of science policy at the  Association of American  Medical Colleges (AAMC) in Washington DC. They  would <em>&lsquo;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&rsquo;.<\/em><\/sup><sup><em> <\/em>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:  &lsquo;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.&rsquo;<\/sup><\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">If they don&#8217;t have the manpower to do the job, I&#8217;m sure we can find plenty of people to do it for them. I&#8217;ll volunteer. And I&#8217;d be glad to field calls from anyone who gets &quot;confused&quot;. Those are the lamest of excuses, almost proving Alison&#8217;s point by themselves. It sounds like a lot of somebodies have drunk the KOL&#8217;s Koolade&#8230;<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier [time for some [potentially disillusioning] research&hellip;] I wrote&#8230; But the part that gets to me is that the Academic Institutions are on the wrong side of this battle. &quot;During the public comment period last summer, the Association of American Universities and the AAMC submitted a joint statement saying: &lsquo;There are serious and reasonable concerns [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11894"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11911,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11894\/revisions\/11911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}