… you’ll enjoy the fact that the thing gets funnier and funnier. Watch the Colbert interview with Thomas Herndon.

More update here.

“If you are making $3 billion a year on Gleevec [a cancer therapy], could you get by with $2 billion?” Dr. [Brian] Druker, who is now director of the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health and Science University, said in an interview.

A group of cancer researchers and physicians calls for reductions in some drug prices.

Here’s another good one:

Dr. John M. Goldman, emeritus professor of hematology at Imperial College in London and a co-author of the commentary, said he knew several researchers who declined to become authors because they feared losing research money from the industry.

Dr. Kantarjian, the lead author, said that was a risk.

“I am sure I am going to be blackballed,” he said. “My research career will be hurt.”

But he said it was time to speak out. “Pharmaceutical companies have lost their moral sense,” he said.

A New Yorker writer anticipates the release, next month, of the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. He finds it bizarre and unsettling, as does UD, that so many Americans are willing to medicalize their experience of life. Their children’s experience of life. He wonders why this organization, the American Psychiatric Association, retains its mental illness franchise.

The market for mental disorders is already enormous, thanks in part to the relentless effort of the A.P.A. to use the D.S.M. to convince us that our psychological suffering is best understood as diseases that should be treated by doctors.

— as King Henry might have said if he’d been around today to watch the entire nation go the way of Alexandra, Virginia, where forty percent of the population is currently on antidepressants. Who told so many people that, whatever they were experiencing, they had to take pills of uncertain utility and serious side effects? Possibly for years?

Despite escalating outrage and dismay at hugely growing numbers of Americans being told they are mentally ill and must be medicated, the psychiatrists who have just completed the latest DSM (the medical and insurance establishments’ official list of mental disorders) stuffed it full of yet more ways for us to think of ourselves as mentally ill.

Inevitably, those among us even somewhat eccentric are increasingly unprotected from pharma’s it’s a mad mad mad mad world business model. Children are especially vulnerable; they must rely on the common sense and protective instincts of their parents to keep doctors like Kajoko Kifuji from laying waste to them.

We all know about the hundreds of thousands of twitchy little boys who are having ADHD meds thrown at them; we should also, as UD‘s pal Allen Frances points out, think about gifted kids, whose sometimes unusual affect also excites the madness mongers. He quotes an expert on gifted children: “When pediatric diagnoses are carelessly applied, gifted children are frequently mislabeled with ADHD, autistic, depressive, or bipolar disorders.”

… Bling.

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.