Readers of UD’s blog at Inside Higher Ed have already been introduced to the idea that the Charles Nemeroff nightmare is continuous with the larger national nightmare of deregulation and greed. Yesterday afternoon, on that blog, UD compared Nemeroff to Lehman Brothers’ Richard Fuld, and later that same day Judith Warner of the New York Times did pretty much the same.
In Diagnosis: Greed, Warner calls Nemeroff
… yet another iteration of the ever-unfolding saga of greed and how the deregulation of absolutely everything has brought our country to this painful season of reckoning. …
It is a product of legislative and cultural changes that have altered the practice of medicine, the work of research universities and the relationship between those universities and industry. And it is marked, like so much of what’s gone off the rails in our era, by the failure of our government to step in to protect citizens.
… [Nemeroff's] extensive, excessive and untransparent ties to the pharmaceutical industry are all too common, unfortunately, among his cohort of “thought leaders” in psychiatry and other medical specialties. And these relationships have led to a dangerous crisis of confidence in the basic integrity and validity of America’s medical research.
… Conflicts of interest between the pharmaceutical industry and prominent research physicians now “permeate the clinical research enterprise,” writes Dr. Marcia Angell, author of the 2004 book, “The Truth About the Drug Companies,” in the Sept. 3 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.
In one review that Angell cites, about two-thirds of academic medical centers had financial stakes in companies that sponsored research within their facilities. In another study, two-thirds of medical school department chairs were found to receive departmental income, and three-fifths received personal income, from drug companies.
… Universities have all kinds of conflict-of-interest rules too, of course, as do the National Institutes of Health, which hand out grant money to researchers. But the federal government counts on universities and researchers to police themselves, and I think we know all too well from recent events on Wall Street where self-regulation leads.
The upshot: No one can be trusted. “Not only do the researchers have the complete conflicts of interests, but the medical schools and the universities do too,” Angell told me this week in a telephone interview. “The Biedermans, the Schatzbergs, they’re rainmakers for the institutions. It’s a broken system.”
… “Greed became respectable,” Angell, a professor of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School and the former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, recalled. “There used to be a sort of tension between doing well and doing good for medical researchers. If they wanted to make a lot of money in a high-risk sort of job they could work for industry. If they wanted to do important, exciting research they stayed in academia and they had a comfortable life but not great wealth.
“Before 1980, they were aware of this tension,” she said. “Before 1980, those who went into industry were held in some disdain. With Reagan, all this changed. There was a strong feeling that the world divided into winners and losers. In medical research this just has had enormous implications.”…
Once again, if you want the same idea presented a lot less diplomatically, go here.
October 10th, 2008 at 7:25AM
“Before 1980, those who went into industry were held in some disdain."
And by God, let’s bring back the good old days!
Seriously, what exactly is the difference between a law professor taking a gazillion dollars for consulting with a company or helping a criminal enterprise such as ACORN with one of its extortion schemes? Music faculty should obviously not be selling out by taking money for belonging to local symphonies; creative writing faculty should not receive royalties from their novels, since the corrupting influence of commercial publishing will impact their writing.
The issue here is not academics getting money for value rendered. The issue is whether relationships have been disclosed so that they can be weighed in the assessment of academic research. It should not be difficult for departments to publish clear annual reports in which each faculty member and the department as a whole acknowledge anything of value received from external entities that relate to their university positions. These disclosures ought to apply to all academic departments, and it should be a firing offense if they are not made.
In the interest of full disclosure, let me start for 2007-08:
$3500–for summer research travel: the TP Family Foundation
$950–for really basic books and journals that Gilligan should have, but doesn’t: the TP Family Foundation
$600–for various undergraduate prizes and other stuff that the department gives out: the TP Family Foundation
$200–for miscellaneous supplies and other shit that’s needed in the department, but that the department doesn’t have money for: the TP Family Foundation
I feel better already.