… university researchers” has long been a theme on this blog. UD‘s coverage has been local (“The [University of Wisconsin] Pain Group may have helped pave the way for OxyContin’s widespread use.”), neighborly, and much farther out, since this is a global phenomenon.
I’m not talking here about the massive, and I believe structural, fraud in most countries in the world, involving corporations openly bribing doctors to mis-prescribe and over-prescribe their meds. This is certainly the big picture, and every now and then someone complains, and newspapers cover the fraud, and corporations cough up penalty money and the fraud resumes. I’m talking – since this is University Diaries – about the corruption of universities by pharma.
Dennis Normile’s concise summary, in Science Magazine, of
the disintegration of Japan’s credibility as a site of research activity, ends by quoting a University of Tokyo official lamenting “a lack of awareness of research ethics.” But how can this be? Is he arguing that scientists at Japanese universities don’t know it’s wrong to make up research results in exchange for money from corporations?
July 6th, 2014 at 10:14AM
I have little doubt Big Medicine’s Iron Pyramid (including Big Pharma) gets what it wants from universities, directly, and through co-optation and mediatization of dissident voices, blunting the goals of poorly thought-out research grants that could yield undesired conclusions, and simply hammering the bejesus out of the SOB who won’t shut up.