… leadership for stifling free speech.

… [T]he administration informed the ethics committee that if [Senator Grassley’s] aide spoke, no administrator would be allowed to partake in the [conflicts of interest] panel. As students at Tufts, it is crucial for us all to recognize the administration’s misstep. While it is understandable that Tufts wants to avoid any conflict regarding the investigation, it seems unreasonable that the topic could not be avoided for the educational purposes the event could provide.

The symposium is intended to provide the audience with multiple views and stances on the medical issues of today. Mr. Thacker has firsthand knowledge and experience about a subject that would have provided a unique and fresh viewpoint at the conference. His voice differs from the professionals of Harvard or Tufts, allowing for some diversity and debate at the symposium itself.

Possibly most outspoken on the issue is ethics committee co-chair Sheldon Krimsky, who removed himself from the issue and the organization of the event when the decision was passed. We praise Krimsky for standing behind his belief and the purpose of the ethics committee as a whole…

Background here.

… Hofstra University … saw a board member, 1960 graduate Bernard Madoff, arrested for fraud. It … escaped financial consequences. The school … has a ban on investing with board members.

“Not a cent,” said Stuart Vincent, Hofstra’s assistant vice president for university relations. “There is a policy on our board that none of our trustees are allowed to do business with the university. It wasn’t just happenstance.”

Other nonprofits weren’t so lucky. Board members such as Madoff and those who channeled money to him made nonprofits casualties of both bad investments and faulty board policies.

Madoff was treasurer of the board of trustees at Yeshiva University, which lost more than $14 million after fellow board member J. Ezra Merkin, chair of the board’s investment committee, funneled money to him…

… [Jonathan] Leo had first notified JAMA of problems with the study, but had heard nothing from the editors for several months. So he decided to go public. The editors said that on the day Leo posted on the Web site, JAMA was six days away from publishing a letter and detailed correction about the study. In other words, they say Leo was right, but he should have been more patient.

JAMA, you’re not looking good here.

Leo says he uncovered the conflict in a simple Google search, the kind that anyone, say, at JAMA could do in a few minutes. He wonders why JAMA took so long to confirm the information.

Good question….

Background here.

… Full Professor?

Subpoena.

… will now investigate, via a special committee, how it came to appoint a couple of bullies to edit its journal.

… with Paul Thacker, a Charles Grassley staffer.

They ate at Two Quail, a place UD used to go to quite a lot when she lived on Capitol Hill, and which now seems to have gone out of business.

Tufts University invited Senator Grassley to speak at a conference there on conflict of interest, and because he wasn’t able to attend, he suggested to Tufts that Thacker, a specialist on the matter, attend in his place. For reasons that remain obscure, Tufts said no to Thacker.

One of the conference organizers has pulled out, in protest.

… Sheldon Krimsky, an environmental-policy professor at Tufts who is co-chairman of the university’s Committee on Ethics…. wrote [in an email message] that he had recused himself after feeling his role as organizer had been “compromised,” and the university’s commitment to academic freedom diminished, by the refusal of Tufts administrators to accept Mr. Thacker’s presence.

Bravo, Krimsky. Just because some of what Thacker says at the conference will embarrass your university doesn’t mean university officials should bar speakers and shut down discourse. Major black mark for Tufts. If I were Grassley, I’d take another look at my schedule and figure out some way of attending this conference.

**************************
Update: An insider’s account, from the excellent Carlat Psychiatry Blog.

… a powerful writer, gets to the core of a complex situation. This is from today’s San Francisco Chronicle:

… Virtually all researchers say they are not influenced by drug company money. Doctors rarely out-and-out lie about their research, but spin influences how a study is set up, its statistical analysis and interpretation. Research on drug studies repeatedly shows that drug trial results are tilted toward a positive description of the drug’s effects when the research is funded by a drug company rather than the government or an independent agency.

Big Pharma money is most powerful when promoting [Joseph] Biederman‘s research and point of view over competing models. Drug companies copy and mail his important papers on psychiatric drugs to every American physician working with children. A member of the Biederman team is at every important meeting on children’s psychiatric issues and medical education. Their presence, and often the conference, itself, are supported by drug industry dollars.

Only when children die or side effects are severe – as in the FDA hearings on children and antidepressants in 2004, and in the recent publicity over obesity and diabetes caused by the bipolar drugs – do opposing viewpoints get the country’s eyes and ears.

Biederman’s conflict of interest problems have exposed his strong pro-drug views to the public for scrutiny. Until now, fear of the Biederman team has operated quietly on the small club of child psychiatric researchers. Only when 2-year-olds started taking three psychiatric drugs simultaneously under a Biederman protocol for bipolar disorder did the emperor’s clothes become so invisible as to begin the naming of names…

Two-year-olds on three drugs simultaneously. Jesus.

… at the Alliance for Human Research Protection, who have written a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association people asking for Bonnie and Clyde to be let go.

A nonprofit group that monitors industry links to medical research called for the suspension of the top two editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association, and an investigation into allegations that they threatened a researcher who criticized a study published in the journal.

The Alliance for Human Research Protection, which is often critical of industry-academic ties, made the requests in a letter it sent Wednesday to the AMA and the journal, also known as JAMA.

“We are deeply concerned about the unbecoming and unethical conduct of the editor in chief and executive deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, who were reported to have used unprofessional and intimidating tactics against a conscientious academic,” the alliance wrote in a letter requesting the investigation. Many doctors and academics have criticized JAMA’s reaction to the academic, Jonathan Leo, on Internet blogs recently.

The AMA and JAMA said they were reviewing the letter and declined further comment. Jordan J. Cohen, a professor of medicine at George Washington University, who is chairman of JAMA’s oversight committee, hasn’t returned telephone and email messages this week…

Perhaps Cohen hasn’t returned calls because he’s too busy dealing with his medical school being on probation.

It’s the only med school in the United States on probation.

Between the JAMA editors and the unresponsive Jordan Cohen, I’m truly beginning to wonder about this organization.

Background on the come an’ git me, coppers! editors of JAMA here.

… ass? Merkins aren’t made for that purpose.

Thus Ezra Merkin’s attempt to cover his ass in the Madoff matter by having his sister write a New York Times opinion piece minimizing his involvement was doomed to fail.

Yet the real question is how she managed to get the piece published at all. It’s rank conflict of interest, an attempt by a protective sister to twist the facts of her brother’s culpability.

Gawker and the Jewish Journal, among others, have expressed amazement at what looks to UD like simple corruption on the part of the NYT. Daphne Merkin’s a longtime contributor to the newspaper, no doubt a friend of some on the editorial board, and they’re doing a friend a favor by letting her try to influence the many lawsuits currently being filed against her brother.

It’s disillusioning for poor UD. She never thought of the New York Times as a provincial newspaper.

… of God.

Everyone’s picking up on Joseph Biederman’s statement in a recent deposition that the rank after full professor is God.

Everyone’s dumping on him because he’s so arrogant as to have said that.

But while there’s every reason to abhor Biederman for his perversion of science, I’m not sure this lame attempt at humor merits the attention it’s gotten. Like a lot of people who end up in courtrooms and Grassley Letters, Biederman’s a twisted character for sure. The fact that he can be sophomoric under pressure, though, seems to UD neither here nor there.

Unfortunately for him, it’s an easy sound bite to sink your teeth into.

Alison Bass tells you why.

The second commenter on the post adds an important point.

Harvard gets a Grassley letter.

… for Harvard.

If I were a pharma boy toy, I wouldn’t want anyone to know about it either.

****************

Update: The story’s spreading like one of Biederman’s Harvard-affiliated ad campaigns for drugs that fuck up little kids.

… to this post, in which Carl Elliott warns of the money-motivated, sometimes catastrophic rush toward “recruiting patients into studies as quickly as possible.”

A law professor at Georgia State has discovered that many medical schools seem to have no policy at all in regard to finder’s fees:

Although paying finder’s fees to researchers and clinicians to identify study participants could compromise the recruitment process and harm human lives, many medical schools fail to address this conflict of interest in their Institutional Review Board (IRB) policies.

Leslie Wolf, an associate professor of law at Georgia State University, studied the IRB policies posted on the Web sites of 117 medical schools that received National Institutes of Health funding. Among the study’s findings, Wolf revealed that less than half of the IRB policies discuss finder’s fees or bonus payments as conflicts of interest, where research sponsors pay members of the research team or clinicians to identify potential participants or for meeting predetermined enrollment targets.

“Since IRBs must review research protocols, and also are in a position to educate investigators about these issues, I thought their policies were an important place to look,” Wolf said. “I thought they would have tried to address it more frequently than they did. That’s a gap in IRB guidance.”

Finder’s fees raise concern because researchers and their colleagues may be tempted to enroll individuals in studies for which they are ineligible, Wolf said.

Wolf is also concerned that only 26 of the IRBs in the study mentioned potential conflicts when physicians recruit their own patients and that only four percent ask doctors to tell their patients that they are not obligated to participate.

via The Chronicle

…voices against greed and corruption in American medical schools, will be speaking at George Washington University tomorrow.

Wednesday, March 18, 4:30pm
GWU-SPHHS Health Policy Department
2021 K St. NW, Ste. 800, Washington, DC

Bass understands the complex, far-reaching conflict of interest scandal as well as anyone, and writes compellingly about it. If I were in DC, I’d take the middle seat in the front row.