This first paragraph from today’s Brown University newspaper isn’t quite correct. It should read “co-ghosted.” Because not only did Brown’s Keller put his name on a fraudulent study, he seems to have allowed his good friend Glaxo to write the article for him. “Keller acknowledged in 2006 that over the years, he had received tens of thousands of dollars from GSK and its affiliates.”

Brown University stands in fervent solidarity with Martin Keller.

After all, this sort of corruption is a drop in the bucket for Brown, whose last president signed off on the Goldman Sachs bonuses, and whose board of trustees is a Rappaccini’s garden of shady hedgies.

Brown has grown a certain money culture; in it, special relationships with friends like Glaxo Smith Kline and Goldman Sachs bloom. That’s Brown.

Hey wait! We didn’t say you could actually track the patients to see whether our device works. We’re going to destroy your academic career now, because we told you what to do, you knew that your job was to provide university cover for our claim that the device works, and your university needs to know that you went off half-cocked like the madman you are and actually tracked your patients to see if the device actually worked.

The University of Saskatchewan’s Daryl Fourney is in big trouble. A big powerful company is filing complaints against him with his employer, and now the New York Times has noticed. After all, a 2010 article by one Chopko totally contradicts Fourney’s findings.

In response, Dr. Fourney noted that Dr. Chopko’s positive 2010 report failed to disclose his financial ties to Vertos; Dr. Chopko, who is Vertos’s director of physician education, described the omission as a “clerical error” and said it would be rectified.

Pesky clerical error! When it comes to conflict of interest, UD, who follows the topic, can tell you that this specific little fuckup occurs with astounding frequency in the scientific literature. I’m sure it will be rectified, along with the study protocol, which will once again specify that you must under no circumstances follow up with your patients beyond the point where we tell you to stop.

The wildly controversial prostate-specific antigen test (PSA) continues to be the subject of studies and debates. Does it help prevent prostate cancer, or is its use actually destructive, subjecting people to unnecessary surgeries? Results and opinions vary too widely, at the moment, to conclude anything with certainty.

Yet the expression of opinions about it would seem fundamental to medical school professors involved in the issue, and you’d think a respectable school like the University of California Davis would encourage its faculty to be part of the debate.

Yet Davis, already dealing with one med school fiasco, now has another, because a dean there got so angry at a professor’s published disapproval of PSA that he told him

he would be punished in two ways. First, he would lose his position in the doctoring program [a special training program he’d put together], and second, he would lose the funding support for a Hungarian student exchange program that he organized.

Why so angry?

Well, money’s involved. The doctor decided to write an anti-PSA opinion piece when he realized that a seminar at Davis was “primarily a sales pitch about the prostate specific antigen (PSA) test, and that its main message was that men should get tested regularly beginning at age 40.” University seminars aren’t supposed to be homes for hucksters, especially when what they’re selling might hurt people. I mean, of course it happens, as in this case at the University of Toronto; but it’s not supposed to happen. Not to mention that professors have a right to say what they like without deans and university lawyers making threats against them, as they did in this case.

Stanford’s got a bit of a problem on its hands. It’s the sort of problem you get when you’re an exceedingly entrepreneurial university and you’ve got your hands and your professors’ hands in a lot of businesses.

Remember the problem they had with Alan Schatzberg’s investments and Alan Schatzberg’s research? It just doesn’t look good for empirical analysis when you stand to make gazillions on its outcome… So Stanford spends half its time tweaking its conflict of interest rules…

And another thing. Take NU Skin, an outfit that, among other things, sells face-whitening cream to women in the Philippines who want to look white, and an outfit with which Stanford’s had a long relationship (meaning NU Skin gives Stanford big money to do anti-aging research). NU Skin’s in serious trouble with the FDA for this and that — the usual stuff, questionable marketing tactics, questionable claims… And Stanford’s name’s being dragged into it… NU Skin’s scientific claims for its products rest on its association with Stanford researchers, and NU Skin talks up that association in its advertising.

So, seeing the shit about to hit the fan, Stanford has done a cease and desist letter

asking the company to stop using a university researcher’s name in its advertising, adding new scrutiny to the skin product maker’s business claims and practices.

According to a copy of the letter emailed to Reuters, Stanford geneticist Stuart Kim is listed as a “Nu Skin Partner” in developing its ageLOC anti-aging products, though he has nothing to do with the company. Nu Skin touts its skin creams and pills as using innovative technology to “reset” genes that promote a more youthful look and feel for its clients, according to its website.

“Neither Dr. Kim nor Stanford is a ‘Nu Skin Partner’ and neither has anything to do with the company,” states the letter, signed by Steven Rosen from Stanford’s Office of the General Counsel.

Which isn’t true, I’m afraid. Kim did do research with NU Skin money (he doesn’t anymore), and while that doesn’t make him what you’d call a “partner,” I guess, it certainly doesn’t rise to nothing to do with the company. To make matters even less factual, Stanford indeed continues its long association with NU Skin via the work of other faculty researchers.

As this guy, an outraged NU Skin investor (its stock value has withered like a ninety year old kneecap) points out, Stanford had to issue another letter directly contradicting this one and admitting that the school has plenty of NU Skin in the game:

Not only does the university cite their longstanding relationship with the company, they essentially apologize for creating any misunderstanding that a relationship did not exist.

It is rather bad form to take millions and millions of dollars from someone, and then when that person has a run-in with the law to disown him. But these are the dilemmas inherent in the entrepreneurial university business model.

The pseuds who pretended to have written it have no shame.

You would think their universities would have a smidgeon.

… will appear at Inside Higher Ed in just a moment… link on its way…

Here ’tis.

Adauto is an unidentified University of Texas El Paso administrator (?), who cheerily cooperates with the local press in providing background on Professor Fernando Rodriguez, who has suddenly up and resigned. Or retired. Or whatever.

Rodriguez turned in his resignation letter in recent weeks, Adauto said. Asked why UTEP didn’t make that information public, Adauto said, “I’m not sure it was necessary. He resigned.”

… Asked whether the professor’s departure is a resignation or a retirement, Adauto said, “Technically, there is no difference.”

He’s just… gone, okay? I don’t want to talk about it!

The reasons he left are indeed manifold and obscure. A scan of the El Paso Times article suggests levels of corruption typical to Texas but rather shocking in other parts of the country. The FBI notes that he

received more than $914,000 in outside employment between 2001 and 2009 without reporting it as required by University of Texas at El Paso rules. Additional documents showed that Rodriguez was paid an additional $233,000 by Aliviane Inc. in 2010, bringing his total pay by the nonprofit to more than $1.1 million.

While Rodriguez will never reach the heights of Nemeroff (that was pharma; this was only the federal government), he managed to pull in quite a lot of money while disclosing none of it to UTEP. Also, unlike Nemeroff (so far), he will probably go to jail.

The University of Texas has a fracking mess on its hands because a prominent professor didn’t disclose – in a study he authored about the fracking industry – his big financial investment in the fracking industry.

Dude still doesn’t get it: “Disclosing my Plains board position would not have served any meaningful purpose relevant to this study.” What a tool.

USC’s fit to burst with pride over Drew Pinsky, graduate of its med school and now on its faculty. He was last year’s commencement speaker!

Some say he’s a pharma whore. Some say… well…

The government alleges that Pinsky was paid a total of $275,000 over just two months – March and April 1999 – to deliver messages about Wellbutrin SR, a Glaxo antidepressant, “in settings where it did not appear that Dr. Pinsky was speaking for GSK.”

USC’s dean says “we know he will inspire [our students] as they take the next step in their medical careers,” and if you don’t think making close to three hundred thousand dollars for pushing a drug for a couple of months isn’t inspiring…! Here indeed is a role model for our students as they embark on their careers as healers.

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

USC’s guy is not just a mouthpiece… He’s a truly dedicated, truly enthusiastic – I might almost say over the top – mouthpiece.

[Pinsky appeared on a radio show that] began with a clip from a woman who said she had 60 orgasms in a row, “just nonstop.” When asked if this was even possible, Pinsky replied, “Oh yeah. For some women. What I think she was amazed about was it just suddenly started and that kind of thing most typically happens from medication, frankly.” He then segues into saying that that is what he is on the show to talk about. Soon he’s talking about … Wellbutrin …

Sure, you can say this is a low number. Most women start at around a hundred orgasms in a row and move up from there. But sixty ain’t too shabby, is it? For someone on an anti-depressant?

I’ll report this three billion dollar settlement because it’s part of an issue this blog follows – corrupt pharma and the professors on your campus who collude with it – but three billion is nothing to Glaxo, and the settlement changes nothing.

(I’m blogging at a local hotel – no internet connection post-storm – and the linking function isn’t working here.)

… as Mrs Potts sings, and I’m talking here specifically about the venerable tendency of some units of some universities to conceive themselves – not evolve into, but define themselves from the word go – as handmaidens to commerce. To put it genteelly.

They’re not made up of researchers with established interests. They’re made up of people who look around at government and industry and say Whaddaya want us to say?

Medicine and economics are the most likely places to find these generators of client-friendly research, but almost any part of the university might harbor them. SUNY Buffalo for instance recently sort of magically generated this new institute, the Shale Resources and Society Institute, “without consultation with the faculty senate or … putting an advisory board in place.” The hastily assembled Shale and Society specializes in producing fracking is beautiful research – and, since this research comes out of a respectable university, the fracking industry waves it about and insists on its legitimacy.

Some SUNY faculty members are unhappy about this. One of them says: “We should make sure that our research efforts don’t look like industry public relations efforts.”

…hits respectable schools.

Yeshiva University, especially under the Bernie Madoff/Ezra Merkin regime, blazed the trail here.

This blog has followed the remarkable multitasking of Harvard University’s last president (while president of Harvard, Summers did “consulting work for [a] hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors.”) Frank Rich writes:

That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution …would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. At the start of his stormy and short-lived presidency, Summers picked a fight with Cornel West for allegedly neglecting his professorial duties by taking on such extracurricular tasks as cutting a spoken-word CD. Yet Summers saw no conflict with moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university.

But this is nothing, really. What Charles Ferguson, in his book Inside Job (based on the film) documents is the way in which

Over the past 30 years, significant portions of American academia have deteriorated into “pay to play” activities. These days, if you see a famous economics professor testify in Congress, or write an article, there is a good chance he or she is being paid by someone with a big stake in what’s being debated. Most of the time, these professors do not disclose these conflicts of interest, and most of the time their universities look the other way.

Half a dozen consulting firms, several speakers’ bureaus and various industry lobbying groups maintain large networks of academics for hire for the purpose of advocating industry interests in policy and regulatory debates. The principal industries involved are energy, telecommunications, healthcare, agribusiness – and, most definitely, financial services.

What tends to get attention are medical school professors’ conflicts of interest, and of course political science professors shilling for people like Gaddafi. Time to pay a little attention to econ.

If you read this blog, you know that the University of Wisconsin’s Pain and Policy Studies group has always been a mite controversial, with its love of drug industry money and its intellectual enthusiasm for that industry’s pain pills. It’s just the sort of academic unit pharma craves in its never-ending quest for respectability (and respectability is quite the holy grail when every year you pay out billions of dollars in marketing violations). Here are all the smiling PPSG people who don’t want to talk to you anymore.

And why not? Because Charles Grassley doesn’t like the fact that much of America is addicted to, or on its way to being addicted to, painkillers, and he sent PPSG a letter because he really wants to talk to them about it.

The groups that were sent letters on Tuesday included the American Pain Foundation, a patient advocacy group, and the Pain and Policy Studies Group at the University of Wisconsin. (The foundation’s board last week voted to close because of “irreparable” financial problems.)

Among other activities, the study group, which at one time received large contributions from Purdue Pharma and other opioid producers, lobbied for changes in state laws making it easier to prescribe the drugs.

Well, they can shut the thing down… But when Congress calls…

UD wouldn’t mind knowing what the University of Wisconsin has been doing all these years while PPSG pill-popped its merry way through their halls. Has the university heard of conflict of interest?

Don’t ban conflicts of interest; manage them, say universities and journals, which means disclosing such conflicts. Yet there’s “ritual ignoring of disclosures,” writes one observer, which makes them public-relations terrific and actual-world pointless.

Harvard’s Eric Campbell notes that

A lot of medical schools have made the decision that speakers bureaus are inappropriate and they have banned them… A lot of institutions have said our doctors are not going to take tickets to football games, go out to eat with drug companies, or accept other incentives.

But there’s the business of whether pharma-compromised researchers should be able to publish in reputable journals. That, and perks beyond football and dinner, continue to be worked out, one campus at a time.

But do not forget the larger context of these debates. They’re not just about the obvious fact that you’re more likely to skew evidence in the direction of people shoveling money at you; they’re about a zillion dollar industry that takes regular multi-million-dollar judgments against it for manifold violations of the law totally in stride; direct-to-consumer advertising that creates stupendous pressure to substantiate claims about this or that disorder; institutional rewards that are all about prolific publishing; pharma-paid ghostwriting agencies that may write the entire article for you, etc., etc. Conflict of interest is not simply a particular problem for particular American universities. As Art Caplan’s comment in this post’s title suggests, it’s a structural problem that has occurred because pharma is now so rich it can buy entire university departments.