America’s newspaper of record, and a high-profile senator, keep up the pressure.

But still nothing. And we need, once again, to ask why that is.  Why universities refuse to do anything about professors on their faculties who ghostwrite in medical research journals.

The New York Times has published yet another, even longer, exposé of faculty who do no work on articles to which they sign their name.  The true authors of the articles are drug companies who both shape the content of the articles and place them in journals read by prescribing physicians. 

The ghost professor essentially does nothing at all.  Nothing.  That’s why she’s called a ghost. She takes money from the company in exchange for allowing it to float her name over the article.  She often has little notion of what’s in the article. 

If she took the time to look, she’d find a whitewash.  An argument for the obvious superiority of the company’s drug over all competing drugs.  She’d find not a scientific article, but a commercial.

… [M]any universities have been slow to recognize the extent of the problem, to adopt new ethical rules or to hold faculty members to account.

Those universities may not have much longer to get their houses in order before they find themselves in trouble with Washington.

With a letter last week, a senator who helps oversee public funding for medical research signaled that he was running out of patience with the practice of ghostwriting. Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who has led a long-running investigation of conflicts of interest in medicine, is starting to put pressure on the National Institutes of Health to crack down on the practice.

… “How long does it have to go on before it actually is stopped? One way to stop it would be if the actual authors were punished in some way,” said Dr. Carl Elliott, a professor at the Center for Bioethics of the University of Minnesota. “But the academics who are complicit in it all never seem to be punished at all.”

… [B]ioethicists said that medical schools must take responsibility for faculty members whose publications do not explicitly acknowledge the work of writers receiving industry support. Such subsidized articles allow pharmaceutical companies to use the imprimatur of respected academics — and by extension, the stature of their institutions — to increase sales of certain drugs, ultimately skewing patient care, they said.

… [T]he medical school of a single university, Columbia, is home to three professors who were authors of Wyeth-financed articles.

… Dr. Michelle P. Warren, [is] a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia. Her article was published in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology in 2004, when women feared that Wyeth’s brand of hormone drugs could be causing particular problems. The thesis of the article was that no one hormone therapy was safer than another.

The published article acknowledged help from four people. But it did not disclose that DesignWrite employed two of those people and the other two worked at Wyeth. Court documents show DesignWrite sent a prepublication copy to Wyeth for vetting and charged Wyeth $25,000 for the article, information not disclosed in the paper.

In a phone interview, Dr. Warren said the article was intended to clear up confusion over the risks of hormone drugs. She said she worked on the project in phone conversations and in meetings… [Way to publish scientific research, honey. Over the phone and in meetings. Hi, it’s Michelle! How much for putting my name on the article? … Sounds good. Go ahead. Presto -Warren’s 155th article this year. Raise and promotion for research productivity coming up.]

 … A new policy at Columbia took effect in January. It prohibits medical school faculty, trainees and students from being authors or co-authors of articles written by employees of commercial entities if the author’s name or Columbia title is used without substantive contribution. [Lots of wiggle room in substantive, so that’s worthless.]  The policy, which does not retroactively cover articles like Dr. Warren’s, requires any article written with a for-profit company to include full disclosure of the role of each author, as well as any other industry contribution.

But Dr. Elliott, the bioethicist, said universities should go further than mere disclosure, prohibiting faculty members from working with industry-sponsored writers. Policies asking only for disclosure “allow pharmaceutical companies to launder their marketing messages,” he said.

No, the laundry will continue to get done; the whitewashing will go on as always. A multi-billion dollar industry can afford a lot of detergent.