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<\/p>\nThe story that lead GSK to the settlement table paying a $3 B fine for past sins is a long and winding road, a lot of it having to do with the Paxil antidepressant and the Department I was affiliated with at Emory. But even practicing a mile or so from the University, I only heard snippets along the way. I knew the Chairman, Dr. Nemeroff, talked about Paxil, and that one of his researchers, Dr. Zach Stowe, advocated its use in pregnancy. But I was never much of a prescriber and never used Paxil because I found out about its difficult withdrawal syndrome early on – one of those situations where the treatment can be worse than the disease. We now know much more of the story – for example that Dr. Nemeroff was picked by STI’s Sally Laden to moderate Paxil’s launch meeting in 1993 and was on their Advisory Board for the duration. As it turned out, Dr. Nemeroff never met a pharmaceutical company that he didn’t like [left, below], but GSK was always high on the list and ultimately part of his downfall at Emory because of a remarkable number of paid speaker bureau presentations that were unreported [right, below].<\/p>\n
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\nTop Psychiatrist Didn’t Report Drug Makers’ Pay<\/font><\/u><\/a><\/strong>
New York Times<\/font><\/strong>
By Gardiner Harris
October 3, 2008 <\/div>\n<\/p>\n
… Universities, too, can benefit from the fame and money the deals can bring — a point Dr. Nemeroff made in a May 2000 letter stamped “confidential” that he sent to the dean of Emory’s medical school. The letter, which was part of a record from a Congressional hearing, addressed Dr. Nemeroff’s membership on a dozen corporate advisory boards [some of the companies’ names have since changed].<\/strong><\/sup><\/div>\n\n
“<\/font>Surely you remember that Smith-Kline Beecham Pharmaceuticals donated an endowed chair to the department<\/font> and that there is some reasonable likelihood that Janssen Pharmaceuticals will do so as well,” he wrote. “In addition, Wyeth-Ayerst Pharmaceuticals has funded a Research Career Development Award program in the department, and I have asked both AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals and Bristol-Meyers [sic] Squibb to do the same. Part of the rationale for their funding our faculty in such a manner would be my service on these boards.”<\/strong><\/sup><\/div>\n<\/ul>\n… For all his fame in the world of psychiatry, Dr. Nemeroff has faced ethics troubles before. In 2006, he blamed a clerical mix-up for his failing to disclose that he and his co-authors had financial ties to Cyberonics, the maker of a controversial device that they reviewed favorably in a journal he edited… The Cyberonics paper led to a bitter e-mail exchange between Dr. Nemeroff and Claudia R. Adkison, an associate dean at Emory, according to Congressional records. Dr. Adkison noted that Cyberonics had not only paid Dr. Nemeroff and his co-authors but had also given an unrestricted educational grant to Dr. Nemeroff’s department. “I can’t believe that anyone in the public or in academia would believe anything except that this paper was a piece of paid marketing,” Dr. Adkison wrote on July 20, 2006…<\/strong><\/sup><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\nNotice in the graphs, things changed in 2006 with the loss of his editorship. Emory clamped down. It took watchdogs from inside and outside the profession, inside and outside of Emory, to sound the alarm, and finally an intervention from the US Senate [Senator Grassley] to put a stop to his behavior in 2008. Soon afterwards, Emory finally made some obviously needed policy changes<\/font><\/strong><\/u><\/a> [May 2009]:<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n![\"Nemeroff,](\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/images\/chairs-3.jpg\" "\\"Nemeroff,")
Nemeroff was not alone. There were others who bartered their prominance and the reputation of their university on this same exchange. But there were two that I’ve come to think of as specifically in league with him, Martin Keller<\/font><\/strong> of Brown University and Alan Schatzberg<\/font><\/strong> from Stanford, even though we don’t know as much detail about their careers. The things that connect them in my mind? They were new chairmen together around 1990; they were working