A Canadian academic was puzzled:

I  recently looked at the c.v. of a distinguished professor of medicine and saw that he had authored (most usually had co-authored) about 800 articles in peer-reviewed journals, an average of nearly 30 per year over his career. His publication rate has accelerated over the years, reaching 40 articles per year in the past decade. How can a scientist author and publish 40 articles in a year? Year after year? In my fields (Science and Technology Studies, Philosophy, Sociology), five peer-reviewed articles in a year is a lot, and most researchers would be happy to write one truly good article each year.

Rather than conclude the obvious — these guys are fucking geniuses — and go back to his low-paid slow-lane job, Sergio Sismondo decided to investigate.

Turns out they’re not writing the articles!

…[D]rug companies and their agents produce a significant percentage of the manuscripts on major current drugs. These manuscripts are then “authored” by academic researchers, whose contribution ranges from having supplied some of the patients for a clinical trial, to editing the manuscript, to simply signing off on the final draft. The companies then submit these manuscripts to medical journals, where they fare quite well and are published. The published articles contribute to accepted scientific opinions, but the circumstances of their production remain largely invisible. When the articles are useful, the marketing departments of the drug companies involved will buy thousands of reprints, which sales representatives (reps) can give to physicians. I call this whole process the “ghost management” of pharmaceutical research and publication.

[Ghost authors] are unlikely to make major contributions to the analysis or writing of an article. They are shown well-crafted manuscripts that have been reviewed by many scientists, writers, and marketers. They are not given access to the data. They are asked their views on very specific points. They are given short deadlines. Thus, authors of industry manuscripts are largely sidelined from the process of analyzing, writing, and publishing research.

About half of what you read about the drug you’re thinking of taking was written by a public relations firm.

[I]t appears that roughly 40 per cent of medical journal articles on major in-patent drugs are parts of individual publication plans on the drugs… [P]harmaceutical companies have complete control over roughly half of all clinical trial data…

A philosopher, Sismundo grapples with the ethics of simulacral science:

The pharmaceutical industry … has developed a [new] form of plagiarism, involving only willing participants. Moreover, it has created new reasons for concern: the hiding of interests that drive research and publication and the possible harm to patients that this may create. When sales reps bring reprints of articles to the offices of physicians, prescribing nurses, hospital staff in charge of formularies, and other drug gatekeepers, those articles may look like independent confirmation of the reps’ pitches. Plagiarizing [ghost authors] lend their good names to the pitches.

On the up side, there’s the rich abundance of scientific output with which, as modern consumers, we are blessed:

Another much-discussed issue in the ethics of publishing is over-publication. We are buried in masses of literature, making it difficult to find what is valuable. Publication hides as much as it reveals. Every year, library budgets increase at well above the overall rate of inflation. This is caused in part by publishers increasing the prices of journals, and in part by the increasing number of journals. The ghost management of pharmaceutical research and publication plays a role within the medical sciences, as industry planners calculate how many new articles bearing key messages they need to affect perceptions and sway those who prescribe drugs.

Herpes, HIV, rabies and influenza are a few of the diseases scientists at a laboratory in Fairbanks pin down by examining tens of thousands of specimens each year.

The work of the Alaska State Public Health Virology Laboratory helps the state track the spread of diseases, including the H1N1 influenza virus, also known as swine flu.

This year, the laboratory received new digs and new equipment. The $32 million facility has been in use for months but is being formally dedicated today.

It’s the most modern laboratory in Alaska, lab manager Terry Schmidt said.

And the timing of the new building couldn’t be better. The World Health Organization last week declared H1N1 influenza the first global epidemic in 41 years.

The building is on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus behind the Museum of the North. At 29,000 square feet, it is about twice the size of the old laboratory, Schmidt said.

… Virus-inspired metal art hangs in a hallway, and a sculpture has been commissioned.

… about a local instance of the national scandal involving university presidents and corporate boards.

He says it pretty well, too. But of course Scathing Online Schoolmarm awards a demerit here and there…

One of the major reasons for paying a university president in South Dakota a $320,000 salary is because it takes a lot of money to hire a great talent with the right skills, credentials and experience to serve as president. [Avoid the wordiness, the use of “is,” and the repetition of president by rewriting in a more direct and simple way: We pay the president of South Dakota State University a lot of money — $320,000 a year — because we want a talented person with the right credentials.]

If the state paid a salary of [drop a salary of] less than $50,000, you’d expect that [drop that] a person of great stature and ability with full-time responsibilities would [drop would and write to] need to seek other income sources [Double dash after sources — He’s about to introduce a strong point. Give it some drama.] such as an additional salary of $195,000 plus a one-time stock-option payoff of almost $200,000 to sit on the board of directors of a multinational agricultural biotechnology corporation. But that’s not the case. [But that’s not the case is confusing. What does the writer mean? Rewrite.]

Monsanto’s gain is South Dakota State University’s loss. This $400,000 payoff creates a perceived conflict of interest not only for the university president but also for the quality of the research results coming from SDSU.

How are the results of research investments at SDSU to be taken seriously when one of Monsanto’s competitors can point to the university president’s $400,000 purse from the corporation and declare the research is skewed? If the perception is tainted, why would benefactors invest in the research services of SDSU or any other South Dakota university if it appears our university presidents can be bought and it becomes tolerated? [Drop and it becomes tolerated. Bought‘s your strong word.] What message does this send to students and parents faced with ever increasing tuition and fee increases? What message does this send to our SDSU research teams?

Personally, I like SDSU President David Chicoine and consider him a good friend. [Drop personally.] I strongly supported and campaigned for him to come to SDSU [Drop strongly.]. When he was hired, I felt SDSU had made a major leap forward in its growth as a prestigious institution. [had grown in prestige. Always try to tighten.]

The job is full time, requiring the full devotion of talents and energies of the president. [The job requires the president’s full time and energy.]  If a $320,000 salary isn’t enough to keep Chicoine on the job at SDSU, it should be negotiated so that we can retain a great talent whose full-time energies are devoted to SDSU. [This is the kicker. If SOS had been writing this, she’d have made this the first sentence. I like its threat to throw the guy out. That’s exactly what a politician should say.]

If Chicoine has spare time [Drop spare.] to promote the interests of [Drop the interests of.] a multinational corporation, he should refuse the pay other than to cover his expenses for travel, food and lodging. Service to academia should not appear as an opportunity to cut a fat hog at the expense of the university’s future. [SOS LOVES cut a fat hog! As a ‘thesdan, she doesn’t encounter phrases like cut a fat hog on a daily basis… In fact she’s never heard cut a fat hog… It’s the very opposite of a cliché– bright, new, and prompting pellucid images of bestial greed.  Bravo.]

As a leading national land-grant research university known for its excellent nonbiased research, we [Demerit goes here.  Are WE a land-grant university?] must do all we can to keep SDSU’s credibility intact. What message does this send to other university presidents? What message are we sending to corporate America?

We should not turn this debate into nitpicking about conflicts of interest. If Chicoine received a salary of $1,000 a year to sit on Monsanto’s board, there probably would be no discussion. That clearly is not the case here.

The state Board of Regents needs to resolve this matter immediately. If the board does not act, this issue will be presented to the South Dakota Legislature for a more permanent solution that will address it fairly and reasonably.  [Drop the address it fairly hoohah and end with the threat to can his ass.]

… takes all the fun out of Angels and Demons:

In this followup movie to The Da Vinci Code, Hanks hears a dire warning that the half-gram of stolen antimatter will cause “a cataclysmic event” if it comes into contact with matter. “They take this in a special canister off to Rome with the intent of blowing up Vatican city,” [Roger] Moore said.

“To put it a little bit into perspective, if we took all the antimatter that we make in one hour at CERN and we dumped it into this cup of tea here, the result would be an increase of about 1 C. So we don’t even make enough antimatter to make a good cup of tea, so you really shouldn’t be worried about anybody blowing anything up with this.”

The movie’s premise makes for exciting science fiction, but fiction it certainly is, Moore said. Scientists are nowhere near capable of making that much antimatter. “It would take us about 10 million years to make half a gram of antimatter, so unless you are planning to live this long, you don’t have to worry just yet,” he said. “The other problem is, even if you could … grab all this antimatter that we’re making, we can’t store it.”

… in Tehran,  commenting on events in Iran:

“Iranian people took up opposition and used an open space to express what they want. Their vote was not just against [incumbent President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad but [against] what he stood for.

… But the most amazing thing is just that so many people came out into the streets to demonstrate and protest.

And for me personally, the most important thing was that [Mir Hossein] Mousavi had taken up reformist slogans which he had previously fought against. I was there at the beginning and I was thrown out of the university that Mousavi shut down as part of the Cultural Revolution.”

[Interviewer]: You’ve talked about and write about the importance of literature and culture in the fight for human rights and liberty in Iran and around the world. But is art, culture, literature ever going to be more powerful than religion? Is it enough to start a revolution?

“If you look at it in the long term – yes it is. [I’ll] never forget when Paul Ricoeur, the philosopher, came to speak in Iran. He was an eighty-year-old but was treated like [the American rock star] Bon Jovi.

At one point the minister for Islamic Guidance said to him: “People like us [politicians] will vanish but you people will endure.” That will always remain with me. We don’t remember the king who ruled in the time of [14th century Persian poet] Hafiz, we remember Hafiz.

… I think Iranian women have become canaries of the mind. [The interview’s translator makes a mistake here. It’s canaries in the mine. But UD‘s enchanted by canaries of the mind.] If you want to gauge a society and how free it is, you go to its women.”

… rise up in Iran. Follow it on Andrew Sullivan.

… limns the declension of Ruth Madoff:

Before the scandal, Mrs. Madoff radiated an understated sense of taste. She favored slim black pants, fine-gauge white cotton crew necks, Susan Bennis Warren Edwards crocodile-leather flats and classic gold jewelry, according to a friend of the family who saw her regularly at gatherings.

Now Mrs. Madoff spends her days largely confined to the two-story four-bedroom penthouse on 64th Street near Lexington Avenue, dressed in jeans and an Oxford-style shirt, according to someone who is in touch with her regularly.

… at the BBC, titled A New Citizenship, allow UD to pause in her daily irrepressible point-making and remind you why she does what she does on University Diaries. (“I do what I do, I think what I think, and to hell with the rest of it,” wrote Harold Brodkey in the last days of his life, in This Wild Darkness; “you don’t actually exist for me anyway — you’re all myths in my head.”) The lectures allow her to shut up for a moment about university coaches and university medical faculties and PowerPoint professors and laptop students so as to refresh your memory as to what ma blogue is all about.

Like Sandel — like Christopher Lasch, like John Kenneth Galbraith, like Mickey Kaus, like a lot of people — UD‘s distressed by what Sandel calls the drift “from having a market economy to being a market society.” Sandel argues that the post-communist triumphalism of American culture has meant a complacency about morality, about civic values that transcend materialism.

The public life of democratic societies is not going all that well… [T]he momentum and the appeal of markets [has made us forget that] norms matter. [The problem is that] markets leave their mark on social norms…

Some of the good things in life are corrupted or degraded if turned into commodities…. How [do we] value [non-market] goods[?] [I have in mind things like] education…

These are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones. We have to debate the moral meaning of these goods, and the proper way of valuing them…. [We must] argue about the right way of valuing goods.

Sandel provides straightforward examples of public activities degraded by commodification — one of his examples, close to UD‘s heart, since she’s a longtime donor, is that of blood donation — but he also mentions education, a far more complex instance of civic decline.

Complex enough, in fact, to keep a blog devoted to the commercialization of universities — the transformation of endowments into hedge funds, complete with managers who, although they work at a non-profit institution, take home thirty million dollars a year; the transformation of campus athletics into a money-driven, money-losing corruption machine; the transformation of medical research into farcically compromised corporate hucksterism — very busy indeed.

I think it’s crucial, when talking and writing about the degradation of civic life into cynical materialism, to avoid platitudes. Not everything in America has declined in this way, and the problem with some writers on the subject (Lasch in particular) is that they exaggerate things. But if we confine ourselves to universities, if we irrepressibly focus on what they’re turning into, I think we make Sandel’s point for him. In abundance.

… killed in a car crash in Uganda.

He was much more than a professor, as his charming webpage shows.

Luke Cole, a leading theorist and practitioner of environmental justice law, who battled toxic waste facilities, mega-dairies, mining companies and other pollution threats in poor and minority communities in California and Alaska, died Saturday in a car crash in Uganda. He was 46.

Cole was traveling with his wife on a rural road in western Uganda when a truck hit their vehicle head-on. He died at a clinic a short time later, according to his father, Herbert Cole. His wife, Nancy Shelby, was flown to a hospital in Amsterdam, where she is recovering from her injuries.

… An avid birder, connoisseur of root beer and collector of bobbleheads and miniature spy cameras, Cole had taken off in early March on what was to be a four-month sabbatical. He traveled to South America, Antarctica, Madagascar and South Africa. Uganda, where his brother lives, was one of his last stops…

La Kid qua Batwoman sings with The Sirens, a George Washington a cappella group.

She’s the blond with the mask and the black cape, standing directly to the left of Wonder Woman (Wonder Woman is Sara Fellman, one of UD‘s students).

Blaming the MBA degree for the country’s current financial mess is unfair.

Pablo Triana elaborates:

… MBAs did no more and no less than what a typical Wall Streeter has the potential to do. Once they receive that diploma and cash in their sign-on bonuses, MBAs became businesspeople, thus displaying the same potential weaknesses as any other businessperson (MBA or not, high school graduate or not): temptation, avarice, corners-cutting, cheating. The MBAs involved in the crisis found themselves in such unsavory position not because of their academic credentials but because of their (degree-neutral) actions as businesspeople. I mean, it’s not like the MBA-endowed Merrill Lynch traders who gorged on impossibly toxic securities based their reckless decisions on anything they were taught years prior by some taciturn professor. “Man, b-school made me so greedy and unethical that I had no alternative but to purchase $100 billion of Subprime CDOs” was most certainly not the rationale behind the actions of the punters anymore than his HBS brainwashing was the main motivation behind Jeffrey Skilling’s peccadilloes in Houston.

B-school administrators and faculty (together with naïve outsiders) are simply assigning too much weight to what goes on inside their hallowed grounds. Maybe that’s why they are blaming their students and the gaps in their education for the worst crisis since the 1929 Crash. These people assume that what MBAs are taught at b-school dictates their future professional activities, and nothing could be further from the truth, especially in the case of finance, particularly in the case of trading activity. I know, I studied and taught at top b-schools. B-schools arrogantly believe that what they teach affects graduates throughout every single day of their lives, but in fact MBAs can’t forget what they were taught soon enough (and employers too typically assume that they didn’t learn much; simply witness the contents of the training programs at investment banks). Note to administrators and profs: no, what you taught (or didn’t teach) MBAs did not cause the crisis; your indoctrination is not that important, is not that relevant, is not that influential, not by a long shot. Once your students receive their diplomas, they, frankly, forget about you. As they should, as grown-up businesspeople…

… discusses the recent exposure of an anonymous blogger’s identity.

… medical school professors conspiring to place fake articles praising their products in respectable journals, the reporter stumbles on one John Buse.  Buse, a professor at the University of North Carolina, is remarkably candid about things.

Buse said in a Nov. 28, 2006, deposition that working with drugmakers over a long period of time can change the way doctors think about clinical problems.

“It’s sort of like Stockholm Syndrome,” Buse said in the deposition, referring to a psychological phenomenon in which kidnap victims begin to sympathize with their captors.

“I’m not saying that the pharmaceutical industry captures me,” Buse said. “But to the extent that the relationship has something above and beyond medicine, science, you know, it could cloud one’s judgment.”

Buse added that many researchers develop emotional attachments to drugs they’ve discovered or studied extensively.

“There’s this natural tendency for people to fall in love with your drug: it’s like your child,” Buse said. “So you have a hard time accepting criticism.”

So there are at least two motives behind the outrageous conflict of interest scandal in America’s medical schools:

1.) A passionate affair with your drug which makes you desperate to protect it and show it in its best light — a desire its manufacturer abets.

2.) Raw greed.

… over, as one newspaper reader puts it, “the 24 arrests [on the football team] in less than 4 years and the fact that we are now being called the new THUG U and the University of Felons in Gunsville.” Another reader puts things in perspective: “[W]hen I was 18-22 I was also finding my way in life. Shooting AK’s, getting tased, and stalking ex-girlfriends is all just part of growing up.”

Students coming to the University [of Georgia] for orientation have more to worry about than making friends or getting lost on campus.

University Police found one student, at the University for his June 4 orientation, asleep in a second floor bathroom in Creswell Hall after a night of drinking at a nearby fraternity house.

“I was woken up by the police and cuffed in the bathroom,” said Michael Houck, an 18-year-old incoming freshman from Peachtree City. “I was in prison for about 12 hours before I was bailed out,” he said….