… have been announced.

UD‘s favorite:

Probability prize

Bert Tolkamp, Marie Haskell, Fritha Langford, David Roberts, and Colin Morgan, for making two related discoveries: First, that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up; and Second, that once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again.

Reference: “Are Cows More Likely to Lie Down the Longer They Stand?” Bert J. Tolkamp, Marie J. Haskell, Fritha M. Langford, David J. Roberts, Colin A. Morgan, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, vol. 124, nos. 1-2, 2010, pp. 1–10.

Mr UD liked this one:

Psychology:

Laurent Bègue, Brad Bushman, Oulmann Zerhouni, Baptiste Subra, and Medhi Ourabah, for confirming, by experiment, that people who think they are drunk also think they are attractive.

Reference: “‘Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beer Holder’: People Who Think They Are Drunk Also Think They Are Attractive,” Laurent Bègue, Brad J. Bushman, Oulmann Zerhouni, Baptiste Subra, Medhi Ourabah, British Journal of Psychology, epub May 15, 2012.

… where the former chief of transplant surgery is on trial for attempted manslaughter.

He also faces three charges of causing bodily injury resulting in death for transplanting livers to unsuitable patients, who subsequently died.

This guy – absurdly not named because of German laws, but so precisely identified in all the articles that everyone must know who he is – has apparently killed quite extensively, in a variety of directions: If the allegations are true, he has killed inappropriate recipients who (one assumes) bribed him to push them up the waiting list; he has also killed non-bribers patiently and legitimately waiting their turn for a liver.

Because this is part of a wider scandal involving medical abuse of the transplant system in Germany, Germans are now refusing – in droves – to donate their organs. As I say, sickening.

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Update: All the yummy details.

Ian Hacking discusses the perennially expanding petals of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness. The latest revision of the DSM is now out, it’s published, it’s a done deal, so instead of people trying to change it or delegitimize it, you’ve got people reviewing it.

Like Hacking. Hacking’s philosophical, logic-based approach considers the DSM a bureaucratically useful fiction: We couldn’t have paid mental health treatment without it. But as “a representation of the nature or reality of the varieties of mental illness,” the DSM is a total failure. Its classificatory system assumes an object with a genealogy and a reasonably stable real-world character. Yet any given mental disorder lacks originary biomarkers as much as it lacks existential discreteness. Thus Hacking makes much of the DSM‘s recourse to the NOS (Not Otherwise Specified) category:

An entry [will] begin with a generic disorder, pass to various species and subspecies, and finally to NOS. Thus in DSM-IV, genus: ‘Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders’. Eight species: e.g. Schizophrenia. Five subspecies: e.g. Catatonic Type (295.20). After the first seven species with their subspecies, we come to the eighth: Psychotic Disorder, NOS (298.9). Some 32 generic disorders end with a species NOS, where patients are judged to fall under the generic heading but not under any of the specific headings… DSM-5 does its best to drop NOS, but often ends up with a mess. Thus we now have ‘Schizophrenia Spectrum and Other Psychotic Disorders’ with a structure pretty different from that of DSM-IV. There is now a species ‘Catatonia’, with two subspecies, ‘Catatonia Associated with Another Mental Disorder (Catatonia Specifier)’ (289.89), and ‘Catatonic Disorder due to Another Medical Condition’ (293.89). The generic entry ends with a noncoded ‘Unspecified Catatonia’. This applies when we cannot make out the underlying condition, or the ‘full criteria are not met’, or if we simply lack information. Then we read ‘coding note: Code first 781.89 … followed by 293.89 unspecified catatonia’, which sounds very much like NOS.

Everything sort of gutters into anything, in other words. “If,” says Hacking, “I started trying to explain the new categories under schizophrenia, I would get lost in the forest. Indeed, in reading these sections I felt unable to see the tree – schizophrenia – for all the branches that were on display.”

The DSM embodies a strange procedure whereby, as Rilke writes in his fifth Duino Elegy:

the pure too-little

is changed incomprehensibly -, altered

into that empty too-much.

A supremely ironic, supremely self-consuming artifact, then, the DSM elaborates a thing to extinction. The book turns out to be a seek and destroy mission; only billable codes are left standing. Hacking rightly describes this take on the DSM as “a far more radical criticism of it than [NIH director Thomas] Insel’s claim that the book lacks ‘validity’. I am saying it is founded on a wrong appreciation of the nature of things.”

With a full blank slate as background, as it were, research has been easy to corrupt. “[U]niversity research departments and learned journals are [often] funded by those who stand to profit – literally – from their presumed objectivity,” writes Will Self in his review of the DSM.

… Pinafore. In the fraud case of Professor Charles L. Bennett, it was, according to the FBI, his “brother and cousin” who improperly benefited (along with Bennett himself, of course) from his personal use of government funds. Northwestern University, on whose faculty he sat while distributing his NIH grant to himself and his brother and his cousin, should have seen that happening, and so has had to choke up “$2.93 million to settle claims of cancer research grant fraud.” The whistle-blower – a purchasing coordinator at NU’s med school – gets almost $500,000 of the proceeds.

Lucky South Carolina College of Pharmacy has pried Bennett free of Northwestern and successfully recruited him to its faculty. What a coup! The center he’ll be running is “is particularly focused on economic return on investment.” So is Bennett.

There’s a potentially very big story emerging out of the University of Louisville (one of the scummiest football factories this blog has covered, by the way), on whose faculty sits Mariusz Z. Ratajczak. Ratajczak has gotten a lot of attention, and a lot of money from the Catholic church, to pursue work on

heretofore unknown stem cells present in adult cells. These tiny cells, he claimed, could perform the same tasks as embryonic stem cells, including tissue regeneration and the miraculous capacity that embryonic stem cells have to mimic other types of cell tissue. Moreover, these VSEL cells, said Ratajczak, could be harvested from adult cells without harming human embryos or relying on them for cell material.

Ratajczak claims to have discovered these cells; but no other scientist has been able to find them, let alone test them in any way. Arthur Caplan writes that Ratajczak’s claim (that “he had found very tiny cells residing in adult cells that behaved just like embryos. Ratajczak said they could develop into all manner of other cells, thereby acting as natural repair kits, given the right conditions and genetic tweaking.”) “must be the product of wishful thinking, or at worst, fraud.”

More detail here.

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The University of Louisville hospital has more than its share of problems lately.

Oh, and I forgot all about Robert Felner.

Let’s see… That was July 6, 2013, and today is July 18, 2013, and the head of Glaxo North America was telling the New York Times on July 6 that her company was definitely going to avoid the massive corruption (her dainty description of what Glaxo did wrong doesn’t quite cover the matter – unless you think three billion dollars in fines for failure to report the status of a couple of studies sounds about right) for which Glaxo has long been renowned.

And maybe Glaxo will avoid that form of corruption – I mean, the form that involves paying American university professors to put their names on bogus studies your advertising people have written and thereby endangering, well, basically endangering the entire population of the world… While ripping the world off to buy the drugs that will kill it…

Anyway, that was then. This is now, several days later, and now this humongous story about Glaxo using whores and bribes to take over the Chinese market is breaking all over the place, and I’m sure Glaxo is again shocked shocked that hundreds of millions of impoverished Chinese people are unable to afford medicine because the price of pills has been jacked up by Glaxo paying prescribing doctors to jack off.

“Each doctor had a credit card from the company. The kickbacks were transferred to the cards the day after drugs were prescribed,” [one] newspaper claimed.

[An investigator] said consumers were being defrauded. The official Xinhua news agency, which was given access to [a Glaxo executive] in detention, quoted him allegedly saying medicine that cost 30 yuan to make could be sold for 300 yuan.

The sums quoted by the police, if correct, suggest GSK was spending a significant proportion of its annual sales revenue on bribing doctors. In 2012, the company’s sales in China rose 17pc, to nearly £759m, from 2011, according to its annual report.

I wonder if Glaxo is also offering sexual relief to UCLA professors.

You know, lots of university professors are walking around with Glaxo in their name. Take this one, at today’s scandal-plagued darling, Rutgers University: Ah-Ng Tony Kong, Professor II and Glaxo Professor of Pharmaceutics. When does the name of a person (the Paterno Chair, the Ira Rennert Professor) or a company get so yucky you kind of think you might want to refuse it?

A company like Glaxo – could its vileness become so generally known that universities would begin turning down naming rights for their faculty?

Nah.

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Update: The Yellow Peril made us do it!

We don’t do this sort of thing.

… à la chinoise.

No better way to optimize your Novartis-funded results on a Novartis drug than to place a Novartis employee on your faculty and put that person in charge of statistical results. This research protocol all but guarantees that your results will be in line with corporate efforts in this case to establish the drug as effective for pretty much any human ill you can think of. And that is just what happened!

The Novartis plant held the same position in four other Japanese university labs. Truly an impressive effort on the drug-maker’s part.

What is it about stem cell research that generates so much fraud? There were those Korean dudes, of course (the country even issued a stamp touting their work – which it then disappeared); but there have been quite a few others. Including – reportedly – Bodo-Eckehard Strauer, a massively prolific German scientist who seems to have fudged things like crazy. A group of investigators looked at

48 of the papers from his group and expose[d] a series of problems, including arithmetic errors in the presentation of statistics and identical results in papers presenting different numbers of patients. The authors also searched systematically in all of the papers for discrepant information – pairs of statements that could not both be true.

They document hundreds of errors. For example, in some papers patient groups are said to be randomised, while in others patients with identical outcomes are reported as being non-randomised to treatment and control groups. “And when we ran the statistical tests on the control groups, we found many amazing p values of up to 10-60 and 10-108,” cardiologist Darrel Francis from Imperial College London, one of the study’s co-authors, told Nature.

In a press release, Francis says: “Looking deeper, the seemingly comprehensive and decisive proof of efficacy gradually unravelled … the more we thought about it, the less we could understand.”

Strauer is already under investigation by the University of Düsseldorf.

The world’s poster child for academic conflict of interest will soon arrive on your shores to grant his blessing to your new research center! You went right to the very top – the US of A’s own Charles Nemeroff – for the inaugural lecture. Perennial object of United States Senate interest because of his fascinating use of taxpayer money, Nemeroff promises to bring to you Brits, as you set out on your own research programs, the same … fascinating ethos he has brought to his own… peripatetic career.

As an American, I can’t hide my pride in the way England, once our ruler, has now summoned one of us for inspiration and advice on how best to pursue scientific endeavors.

Naturally, given Nemeroff’s record, there are nay-sayers at your institute.

Derek Summerfield, honorary senior lecturer at the Institute, wrote in the BMJ, formerly called the British Medical Journal, last week that the Institute of Psychiatry’s lauding of Professor [Charles] Nemeroff as “one of the world’s leading experts” showed how psychiatric academe “sails blithely on as if such revelations beg no broader questions about its associations and supposed scientific independence.”

Yes, sail blithely on! You have much to learn from Charles Nemeroff about grantsmanship. Good show!

But the worst psychiatrists – and the merely mediocre – and the greedy – are. With hideous effects on our autonomy and our bank accounts.

That’s why, as David Brooks urges, we should regard the DSM with enormous skepticism.

Kessler famously argues that about half of us are mentally ill; really though, he adds, thresholds being what they are, we’re all mentally ill. The only question is where you draw the line.

But there’s no question any more, is there? Kessler’s being faux-naif. The line – given the arbitrariness of science in the matter – the line lies in commerce. At what point does the pharma market become saturated with requests for psychotropics? At what point does demand exceed supply? Look there for the line.

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Demand is huge. All praise to the DSM for holding up its end.

Happily, supply is also robust. Holding up very well indeed.

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Half of us mentally ill? Markets don’t do things by halves.

We’re well on our way to one hundred percent.

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Think like a Buddhist:

Where you do you draw the line?

There is no line.

[Joseph] Biederman, along with Charles Nemeroff, who was then at Emory University, and Alan Schatzberg of Stanford (the 116th President of the American Psychiatric Association) are in many ways poster boys for [pharma corruption]. Ironically, it was Schatzberg, during his presidency in 2009, who responded vehemently to Allen Frances’s criticisms of the DSM 5 task force by pointing to the $10,000 in royalties Frances was still receiving from DSM IV. Apparently, the $4.8 million in stock options Schatzberg had in a drug development company, or the fat fees he received from such companies as Pfizer, had no similar distorting effect on his judgment — just as the $960,000 Charles Nemeroff received from GlaxoSmithKline (while reporting only $35,000 to his university) had no influence on him. And just as the millions of dollars that Biederman and his associates at Harvard received for creating a new diagnosis and a massive new market for antidepressants and second-generation antipsychotics among young children (drugs associated with massive weight gain, metabolic disorders, diabetes, and premature death) had nothing to do with their behavior!

Nemeroff is now at the University of Miami, but that’s not a scandal because Miami isn’t a respectable university. The scandal lies at respectable places like Stanford and Harvard, which will “turn a blind eye to ethical failings if the money on offer is sufficiently tempting.”

… takes you, in miniature, through the moral and financial history of this country. Let us follow it.

The place was founded in 1863 by the Poor Sisters of Saint Francis. This charitable lot opened a soup kitchen during the Great Depression that fed hundreds of people a day. Over the years it’s been sold and sold again, and it’s had lots of financial trouble along the way and presumably compromised somewhat on care … But the story has a happy ending!

Hoboken University Hospital (UD can’t figure out what the “university” is doing in the name, but as long as the word is there, University Diaries will write about it) has recently been sold to investors – featured on the front page of today’s New York Times – who do things like this:

“Their model is to charge exorbitant rates, particularly for emergency room services, and if the insurance companies don’t pay them, they threaten to go after the member for the balance of billing,” said Carl King, head of national networks for Aetna, whose in-network contract was also ended by Bayonne in 2008.

And now their hospitals are doing great! They’re taking struggling non-profits once affiliated with shabby little charitable outfits like those poor sisters and turned them into HUGE profit centers! Look at what’s going on in another of their hospitals – the most expensive hospital in the United States!

Aetna’s internal data showed that Bayonne Medical’s emergency room charges jumped again in 2012 and are running 6 to 12 times as high as those of surrounding hospitals. Last fall, [the chief investor in Bayonne Medical] bought the designer Tory Burch’s oceanside home in Southampton for $11 million, according to public records.

Yes, the story of this hospital’s transformation from a modest charitable endeavor devoted to healing to a cutting-edge collections agency is America’s Story.

… at Inside Higher Education, on the upcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.