Let’s sample a few paragraphs from a pretty typical recent appraisal of GSK. This is from Forbes – not exactly a business-unfriendly publication.
Glaxo is a leader in pharma fraud and wrongdoing, with other industry heavyweights close behind. Over the past decade, whistleblowers and government investigations in the US have exposed a never-ending series of problems by numerous pharma companies in all facets of the industry, starting with fraudulent “research” papers used to bolster marketing and continuing through to the manufacture of contaminated and defective products, the marketing of drugs for unapproved and life-threatening uses and the mispricing of prescription drugs.
But the combination of pharma’s noncompliant corporate culture and the prevalence of corrupt business practices in China and other emerging economies could have a lethal impact on many more consumers as pharma shifts more research and development functions, manufacturing operations and marketing efforts to those growing markets.
UD will ask what she has asked on this blog before: When does a company like Glaxo get filthy enough – lethal enough – for American universities to reconsider their relationship to it? Take for instance the fact that the president of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center is on Glaxo’s board of directors. Does that bother you at all? Does that bother anyone at Texas Southwestern – a school that’s had more than its share of corruption scandals in the last decade – at all? Put aside questions of reputation, questions about whether universities are something different from corporations – such questions have no relevance to Texas institutions. Rather, think of this developing story pragmatically. You have an endemically corrupt industry. Corruption is all it knows. To quote that guy in An Officer and a Gentleman, It ain’t got nowhere else to go. To quote that guy in the Frank Sinatra song, It’s gotta be it. To quote that guy in the Cage Aux Folles song, It is what it is. To quote that chick in the Barbra Streisand song, Don’t ask me not to cheat I’ve simply got to. To quote that chick in the Mitzi Gaynor song, Get the picture?
So, you know, like SAC Capital Advisors and like Goldman Sachs, GlaxoSmithKline is really really grotty. Is this – university-wise – even an issue? Even a subject? Do all the Glaxo professorships at your institution bother you maybe even slightly? Does the fact that your medical school is run by a Glaxo director stand out to you in any way as something worth thinking about?