… for Harvard.

If I were a pharma boy toy, I wouldn’t want anyone to know about it either.

****************

Update: The story’s spreading like one of Biederman’s Harvard-affiliated ad campaigns for drugs that fuck up little kids.

… to this post, in which Carl Elliott warns of the money-motivated, sometimes catastrophic rush toward “recruiting patients into studies as quickly as possible.”

A law professor at Georgia State has discovered that many medical schools seem to have no policy at all in regard to finder’s fees:

Although paying finder’s fees to researchers and clinicians to identify study participants could compromise the recruitment process and harm human lives, many medical schools fail to address this conflict of interest in their Institutional Review Board (IRB) policies.

Leslie Wolf, an associate professor of law at Georgia State University, studied the IRB policies posted on the Web sites of 117 medical schools that received National Institutes of Health funding. Among the study’s findings, Wolf revealed that less than half of the IRB policies discuss finder’s fees or bonus payments as conflicts of interest, where research sponsors pay members of the research team or clinicians to identify potential participants or for meeting predetermined enrollment targets.

“Since IRBs must review research protocols, and also are in a position to educate investigators about these issues, I thought their policies were an important place to look,” Wolf said. “I thought they would have tried to address it more frequently than they did. That’s a gap in IRB guidance.”

Finder’s fees raise concern because researchers and their colleagues may be tempted to enroll individuals in studies for which they are ineligible, Wolf said.

Wolf is also concerned that only 26 of the IRBs in the study mentioned potential conflicts when physicians recruit their own patients and that only four percent ask doctors to tell their patients that they are not obligated to participate.

via The Chronicle

… at so many universities. One doesn’t know where to start. UD spends much of her time attending to the Big Two: Medical school conflicts of interest, and, of course, big time athletics.

Take a gander at these comments today in the New York Times about March Sadness. See especially the English professor at the end, William C. Dowling.

After lunch at Sarabeth‘s, Les UDs went across the street and down to the end of School House Lane to visit Nancy Forrester’s Secret Garden.

Hidden among its overgrown ferny paths is an aviary lunatic asylum, a dark place where weirdly articulate parrots, caged like Bertha Rochester, hurl imprecations at you.

There must have been twenty or more of these livid obsessives in that evil place, turning and turning in their narrowing gyres, pressing their angry eyes up against the wires at you, flinging themselves off their perches and pecking about for feed…

WHODYATHINKYOUARE? WHATSTHEMATTERDEAR? COMEHERECOMEHERE HEYBIGGIRL WHATSTHEMATTERDEAR? WHODYATHINKYOUARE?

All of them all at once, like Bette Davis as Baby Jane if they broadcast the film on one of Nam June Paik’s installations…

“Nothing’s the matter!” said UD as she fled. But she felt defensive saying it.

“I’m going to put people in my place, so when the history of this administration is written at least there’s an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened,” [George W.] Bush said [of his projected autobiography].

…nothing to celibrate.

**********
Update: They fixed it.

Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley suggested that AIG executives should accept responsibility for the collapse of the insurance giant by resigning or killing themselves.

“I suggest, you know, obviously, maybe they ought to be removed,” Grassley said. “But I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they’d follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.”

… Dove — a bird all over Key West, and currently sitting in my terminalia catappa — is exactly the hoo – HOOO – hoo Mick Jagger does toward the end of Sympathy for the Devil (the hoos start after he takes off his shirt).

Hoo HOOO Hoo.

How could this:

sound like this:

…voices against greed and corruption in American medical schools, will be speaking at George Washington University tomorrow.

Wednesday, March 18, 4:30pm
GWU-SPHHS Health Policy Department
2021 K St. NW, Ste. 800, Washington, DC

Bass understands the complex, far-reaching conflict of interest scandal as well as anyone, and writes compellingly about it. If I were in DC, I’d take the middle seat in the front row.

…HURTS.

University Diaries has covered chlamydia and colonoscopy poetry contests on this blog; now there’s one for migraines.

MyMigraineConnection.com and Teri Robert, patient advocate and Migraine expert on MyMigraineConnection.com, have kicked off their popular annual “Putting Our Heads Together” Poetry Contest. The contest, in its ninth year, seeks the most creative and influential pieces of poetry on how Migraine disease and/or headache disorders affect each entrant’s life.

… [A scientist who pointed out a conflict of interest at the Journal of the American Medical Association] says he received an angry call from JAMA executive deputy editor Phil Fontanarosa last week, shortly after Leo’s article was published on the BMJ Web site. “He said, ‘Who do you think you are,’ ” says Leo. “He then said, ‘You are banned from JAMA for life. You will be sorry. Your school will be sorry. Your students will be sorry.” Fontanarosa referred a call for comment to a JAMA spokeswoman, who said Leo’s retelling of the conversation was “inaccurate.”

“He did talk to the guy, but he said he didn’t threaten him,” the spokeswoman said. “It was something along the lines of not setting a good example for students. He didn’t say he would be banned. He didn’t think Leo was taking a very good approach by taking this confidential process within JAMA out to media and another medical journal. It’s just not the way things are handled here.”

The call from Fontanarosa was followed up by ones from JAMA editor-in-chief Catherine DeAngelis to Leo’s superiors, Leo says. He said she asked his superiors to get him to retract his article in the BMJ. Leo says he decided to call DeAngelis directly to find out what, in particular, she might be objecting to. He said she was “very upset” but didn’t make specific complaints about the article.

In a conversation with us, DeAngelis was none too happy to be questioned about the dust-up with Leo.

“This guy is a nobody and a nothing” she said of Leo. “He is trying to make a name for himself. Please call me about something important.” She added that Leo “should be spending time with his students instead of doing this.”

When asked if she called his superiors and what she said to them, DeAngelis said “it is none of your business.” She added that she did not threaten Leo or anyone at the school.

**************************************

The lady who’s editing JAMA
Is one hell of a big red hot mama.
Fontanarosa?
He’s Mafiosa.
DeAngelis looks like Osama.

Attention has shifted to its medical school, but George Washington University’s basketball program, as a Washington Times columnist points out, also looks a bit gruesome close up.

I’ve got a short post up at Inside Higher Ed about this year’s recipient of the Templeton Prize; otherwise, I’ve spent today working on stuff for that anonymous agency  (I mentioned it in an earlier post) that has asked me to write about writing for them.  If anything dramatic comes of this agency’s overtures to UD, you’ll be the first to know.

Meanwhile, Les UDs are about to walk north to see the sunset.   They have heard from La Kid, who is on the beach in Negril.  She is very happy, and quite certain that her setting is even more beautiful than her parents’ setting.

Or maybe we’ll take a drive.  In our Chrysler Sebring convertible! Along with the Mini Cooper, the Smart Car, and the Prius, it’s a majorly popular car down here.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think UD just saw the Space Shuttle!

Yes, laugh if you like and as I say please correct her if this is impossible, but UD was a moment ago sitting on her balcony enjoying the evening breeze when she saw in the distance, low on the horizon, a huge long pinkish flame that just seemed to stay in one place in the sky.

I mean, it didn’t look like something coming out of a jet, because the flames were too big, and anyway the aircraft didn’t seem to be moving in the sky the way a jet moves…

“Whazat?” UD asked herself out loud. (Mr UD had gone up to Mallory Square to see the sunset.)

Then she went inside and idly turned on the television, which informed her that, seconds ago, the Shuttle had taken off from Cape Canaveral…………………………………

***********************************
update:

F – U- U- U- CK.

The brilliant light emitted by the two solid rocket boosters will be visible for the first 2 minutes and 4 seconds of the launch out to a radius of some 520 statute miles from the Kennedy Space Center.

Depending on where you are located relative to Cape Canaveral, Discovery will become visible anywhere from a few seconds to just over 2 minutes after it leaves Pad 39-A.

… when under his watch, in 2003, two Harvard money managers each took home $35 million in bonuses?

I mean, now, sure, he’s tossing the word around like confetti. But where was outrageous then?