America’s struggling pharmaceutical industry finally gets the spokesman it needs! Bravo, John LaMattina, for having the guts to go up against the power of Marcia Angell and tell it like it is!

In his year-end review of bogus research, Gary Marcus notes endemic cheating in scientific studies and lists six ways to fix the problem. Each approach makes sense – do something about publish or perish, establish an ethical code, encourage insiders to police the work in their field…

But for some reason, Marcus omits the biggest problem of all: pharma. The staggering financial incentives for colluding with corporations and their ghost writers make an incentive like tenure look paltry.

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UD thanks Dirk.

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UPDATE: And don’t forget this problem.

LOL. Even their public relations firm has had it with the new Texas cancer research agency! It’s like You paid us to handle  this much shit, but your agency has already produced THIS much shit, so we’re outta here.

Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, its billions in dollars funded by taxpayers, has only been around a couple of years, and already its corruption stinks to high heaven. The latest: A criminal probe of the organization.

Hill and Knowlton should have seen it coming. This is Texas! You don’t mess with Texans making money!

CPRIT: Where our profit margin, and your metastasis, meet.

… from the collective “rich, fat, tired” mind of America is about to released. The most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – a megaton Memories of Overdevelopment, As I Lay Diagnosing, and Diazepam Comes for the Archbishop – will soon hit the shelves.

Stephen Dedalus, in Ulysses, called Irish art “the cracked looking-glass of a servant.” The DSM is the cracked looking-glass of a master. It is our pill-dependent, Alexandrine culture’s most soul-searching, compendious, self-expression yet.

Allen Frances, who was there when the DSM started to explode, has consistently warned against pathologizing an entire country. Many other people – and many mental health organizations – have done the same. But our family practitioners remain weirdly dependent upon this obese mashup, this encyclical of enervation.

The best that can be said about it is that it adequately conveys what we have become.

A good reason to take up smoking.

The University of Kentucky distinguishes itself not merely in football and basketball. The federal Office of Research Integrity has singled out one of its highest-profile professors for a decade of research fraud.

Eric J. Smart, a former UK professor of pediatrics and physiology, pediatrics vice chair of research and the Barnstable-Brown chair in diabetes research … falsified data that was included in at least 10 published papers and numerous reports and applications.

… Among the falsified data … were five grant applications and three progress reports about nonexistent “knockout” mice, which have been genetically engineered to have at least one gene turned off, or “knocked out,” through a targeted mutation.

The ORI found many of Smart’s published findings to be falsified also. In more than 33 instances the office found Smart to be guilty of manipulating “western blots” — an analytic technique that allows scientists to find a specific protein in a sample of tissue — to falsify data in publications and reports in order to complete his research.

Vice chair of research! As with their coaches, UK really knows how to pick ’em.

Smart’s now teaching high school at the wonderfully named Bourbon High; but the county superintendent says Smart has assured her “there is no evidence to base their (the ORI’s) allegations on.” Whew! You wouldn’t want someone who’s been systematically lying about the results of medical research for over ten years teaching your kids.

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By the way, Scathing Online Schoolmarm will point out that the article about Smart in UK’s paper says his research has now been “censored.” I think they mean “censured.”

… hide nor tuft of Keith Ablow, the faculty member who said that the only responsible thing he as a physician could recommend to Vice President Joe Biden’s family would be extensive tests for dementia and alcoholism.

Long before his post-debate analysis, Ablow had drawn protests from Tufts students and staff; but he remains that curious non-thing, an assistant clinical professor.

Ablow blows up frequently in public places with strange and strictly non-empirical remarks about other people, and, each time he does, Tufts notes that Ablow is non-faculty faculty – gets no money, has done nothing on campus for years.

Tufts calls Ablow’s position “voluntary,” but UD wonders what this means. He gets to just, like, be on the university’s faculty, because he wants to? Can any MD who thinks Soviet-style forensics is a blast voluntarily attach himself to Tufts? Is the position voluntary for Ablow and involuntary for Tufts?

Let’s say, for instance, that Tufts would like to stop enjoying its affiliation with Keith Ablow. Let’s say Tufts doesn’t think it’s right for Ablow to enjoy the respectability an academic affiliation confers. Let’s go overboard and even say that psychiatrists on the psychiatry faculty at Tufts conclude Ablow’s non-empirical procedure runs counter to everything psychiatry as a respectable therapeutic and intellectual endeavor has tried to be. Can’t it do anything about that?

A Japanese fraudster managed to convince that country’s largest newspaper that he’d injected reprogrammed stem cells into people with diseased hearts and dramatically improved their functioning.

In a poster presented at a meeting of the New York Stem Cell Foundation, [Hisashi] Moriguchi – who claimed to work at Harvard Medical School and the University of Tokyo – described results from a trial in which cardiac muscle cells were grown from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, and transplanted into six US patients with severe heart failure.

The embarrassed newspaper has issued an apology.

Now that all the legitimate scientists have left the state of Texas’ Cancer Prevention and Research Institute, the state can breathe a sigh of relief. Three billion dollars for funding distribution is a lot of money, and the cronies and profiteers will be able to get at it much more easily. All the powerful people who care more about peer review than money have left in disgust.

Gilman’s resignation [he was chief scientist] followed a decision by the institute’s oversight committee to set aside scientific grant proposals and rush approval of an $18 million commercialization grant led by the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Ah, M.D. Anderson, domain of fuck-conflict-of-interest Ronald Pinho!

Since his arrest in Italy, [Mark] Weinberger, [a plastic surgeon found guilty of fraud,] has been locked up at the city’s federal Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he claimed to cook meals for inmates and teach yoga classes, according to the Chicago Tribune. In addition, Weinberger conducted a class on non-violence in which he “personally scripts Socractic dialogues taking place between various historical figures,” the paper reported.

In the local paper, a geology professor defends his work.

I must respond to the recent letter to the editor by Ms. Meredith Berg strongly critical of my upcoming talk at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls on St. Croix Valley geology. … Ms. Berg is correct that I will not be spending time on a young-earth or Biblical flood model for the St. Croix Valley. In my 50 years of studying and doing geology here and around the world I have not seen a shred of geological evidence for this, and it would do my audience a disservice to spend time on it.

With his NIH colleague, Tibor Borsos, he wrote a book about complement.

Now immunologists at Cardiff University who study complement are under investigation for research fraud. Image manipulation, among other things.

UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior‘s got all sorts of shit going down lately.

There’s Bystritsky, who’s front and center in the Phyllis Harvey lawsuit against that university.

And there’s Strober, a Ghost of Glaxo Past… (see post just under this one)…

On their main page, Semel invites you to PARTICIPATE IN OUR RESEARCH, but I get the feeling it’s not such a good idea.

… your university hospital is the most treacherous part of campus. There’s lots of money at stake, so corruption is highly likely. Conflict of interest among your professors may be rampant. There’s always someone on the staff stealing oxycontin to sell it. Some of your anesthesiologists are addicts.

Cowboys on the surgery team try this and that without bothering with the institutional review board. Since you don’t really pay attention to the doctors you allow to affiliate, some of them will turn out to run pill mills or, like UCLA’s Arnold Klein, will embarrass you in other ways.

You try to make the hospital a big profit center, but that almost never works. Meanwhile, as in this story from the University Medical Center Göttingen, some of your surgeons are managing to make it work quite nicely on a personal basis.

A surgeon identified as Dr. Aiman O. is suspected of fraudulently manipulating dozens of his patients’ test results, making them appear sicker than they were to get them liver transplants more quickly — and possibly putting them ahead of people who more desperately needed them. The case first emerged in late July at the University Medical Center Göttingen, in the northern German state of Lower Saxony, from where the senior physician has been suspended since November for allegedly tampering with some 23 transplant cases. A gastroenterologist suspected of involvement has also been suspended.

There’s huge money in this. Truly rich, truly desperate people will pay amazing sums for an organ, and all you have to do is shove aside other sick people who’ve been following the rules and waiting.

Whether it’s Joe Paterno at Penn State or Dr. J. Paul Muizelaar at University of California Davis, you really want to keep an eye on your overpaid and overlaureled personnel. Eventually the money and adulation will do to them what it does to pretty much everyone. It will make them believe their own publicity, and it will make them consider themselves free to do what they like, immune from consequences.

Immunity is Muizelaar’s medical speciality; he’s a research surgeon who tries to activate patients’ immune systems to fight cancers. Together with another faculty member, he’s been intrigued by the possibility that introducing bacteria into the heads of people with late-stage brain cancer might activate their immune system and in the process attack the disease.

Well and good; but these guys seem not to have felt the need to get institutional approval for this human experimentation. Of course, no problem getting the patients’ approval; they’re desperate. But precisely because people are desperate and therefore susceptible to dangerous and unproven procedures, you’ve got things like institutional review boards and all.

The guys are now banned from human research. Davis risks losing its federal research funding altogether.