… Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health.

She’s reading it now, and will comment on it when she’s finished.

A recent graduate of the University of California Berkeley law school (Boalt) responds – in a comment thread – to his dean’s leadership of that group.

I’m an ’07 alum. I still have significant debt. Yet I work in BigLaw and I dedicate a significant portion of my salary to charitable contributions–which up to now included Boalt.

I usually ignore the letters and pleas and do all my donations in a big chunk at the end of the year, so this news couldn’t have come at a better time for me to be able to avoid giving to Boalt this year. I’ve been hearing for six years from [Dean Edley] how CA is in dire financial straits, the UC can’t afford anything, the law school needs private donations just to operate, let alone to be able to award scholarships, pay for tech improvements, embark on building campaigns, etc etc etc. I dutifully–and happily–contributed. Boalt did a lot for me and I wanted to give back.

But I’m done until DE leaves or provides me a convincing explanation for why he deserves an even fatter pension when he knows damn well UC and the state can’t afford it. Yes, he could make more in the private sector–sort of. For anyone who can show me a private sector job with the same sort of salary and guaranteed retirement benefits, I can show you 100 where the salary is the same (or even lower) and most compensation comes from stock and options.

… Michael, sends her news of The Hipster Huckleberry Finn.

UD herself is at work on The Nice Girl’s Ulysses:

Dead: an old woman’s: the grey sunken tushy of the world.

Here’s an eerie interview with a ghost for pharma. Read the whole thing.

Excerpts:

Q: I wonder if a member of the public might not feel it to be odd for a pharmaceutical company to pay a freelance writer to produce a scientific paper that discusses its product in comparison with the product of a competitor; a paper moreover that concludes that the sponsoring company’s product is likely to be more effective tha[n] the competing product. I would think they would feel that a conflict of interest must inevitably arise from doing so. Would you agree that there might be a conflict of interest issue here?

A: Because I received payment?

Q: Because a pharmaceutical company paid you to produce an article that talks about its own product, compares it with a competitor’s product, and concludes that the sponsoring company’s produc[t] may be more effective?

A: I can see that a layperson, or a member of the public, might feel it to be a little unethical. But I don’t see any conflict of interest for me per se. If anything, the conflict may lie with the journals that are willing to accept such a sponsored publication, while knowing that it may inform decision-makers.

The elements of the ghost’s response to the interviewer’s question are worth specifying, because they are absolutely classic:

1. First, dismiss moral questions as emerging from naive laypeople.

2. Next, pass the buck. It’s the journals’ fault.

3. Move on to It’s not marketing; it’s information. “[Pharma] need[s] to get … information across to the prescribers.”

4. Conclude with: You can’t expect university professors in medical research to write and publish their own papers! They’re too busy! “[T]he people who do the necessary clinical research are busy physicians and academics, and they have a lot of commitments.”

Background on ghostwriting here. We’ll never get rid of it. Too much money. Too many lazy assholes.

… administrators at the University of Copenhagen have – it’s claimed – been overlooking Milena Penkowa’s scientific fraud (misuse of grant money, irreproducible experimental results, etc.) for almost ten years.

It’s a strange story. Apparently after her doctoral thesis failed, the dean got a bunch of people outside the university to pass it.

Questions over Penkowa’s research began at least as early as 2002 with suspicions over her doctoral thesis. For instance, Sørensen says, Penkowa claimed to have performed experiments on around 1700 rats over several months. The committee rejected her thesis.

According to Sørensen, the university’s then dean of faculty Ralf Hemmingsen intervened and sought an external review of Penkowa’s thesis by two other researchers. They were critical of the committee’s decision, arguing that there was no clear evidence of research misconduct. Penkowa resubmitted her thesis to a different committee of researchers not based at the University of Copenhagen and passed, Sørensen says.

So at the University of Copenhagen you can pass your thesis by scraping together a bunch of people from somewhere to say it’s okay?

Here’s a letter from a bunch of scientists calling for an investigation.

… (Texas Tech, the University of New Mexico, Yeshiva University) are scandal magnets, always in the news for fuck-ups big and small.

Among the scandal magnets, the University of Miami has long been notable for its combination of sports violence and criminal associations. A blogger at the Miami New Times updates us:

The University of Miami sure has a problem with getting caught up with Ponzi schemers. First, high profile athletic booster Nevin Shapiro was busted for a scheme, and now the university is being sued for its involvement in the alleged Ponzi scheme run by Allen Stanford. The suit claims that UM kept nearly $6.4 million it received from Stanford’s company that it doesn’t deserve.

… from UD‘s daughter, La Kid.

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

“You’re only young once,
but you can be immature forever.”

— Germaine Greer

A graduate student at Princeton University kills himself. Before doing so, he writes a long note of explanation.

It’s here.

He was 27. He spent his life trying to lull himself out of feelings of having been deeply and permanently contaminated by a series of rapes he endured when he was a child.

I never liked what alcohol did to me, but it was better than facing my existence honestly. I haven’t touched alcohol or any other drug in over seven months (and no drugs or alcohol will be involved when I do this) and this has forced me to evaluate my life in an honest and clear way. There’s no future here. The darkness will always be with me.

He tried various worthy pursuits.

[N]othing I did made a dent in how depressed I was on a daily basis and nothing was in any way fulfilling.

Freud suggests that many suicides represent homicidal aggression against others turned against the self, and that seems borne out to some extent here.

I feel an evil inside me. An evil that makes me want to end life. I need to stop this. I need to make sure I don’t kill someone, which is not something that can be easily undone. I don’t know if this is related to what happened to me or something different. I recognize the irony of killing myself to prevent myself from killing someone else, but this decision should indicate what I’m capable of.

In his note, Bill Zeller repeatedly calls himself a “broken” person, and he’s right. Broken long ago, he was never able to put himself back together again.

Well, let’s be fair. Blame also attaches to Stafford’s colleagues at Stanford, and to professors at other American universities, who get paid by drug companies to hawk therapeutically unsubstantiated, physically destructive, and enormously expensive atypical anti-psychotics to prescribers. Now these over-prescribed pills are a national blight.

… shows his students how one person can make a difference. As the leader of the U Cal 36, he is making legislative history in California.

… rural life.

… on Venezuela’s universities. His various attempts to take them over have generated immense student protest; and now, with opposition to his government growing, he’s decided to pull back on a law that would have handed control of the universities to his regime.

… never lets up.

The University of New Mexico’s David Schmidly’s a ball o’ fire, leaping from nepotism to bid rigging allegations to faculty no confidence votes to the retention of violent football coaches to athletic directors who were allegedly in on the alleged bid rig to… nepotism again. (UD‘s Schmidly posts are plentiful. Go to it.)

President Schmidly tried to give his son Brian a $90,000 job at UNM, but public outrage made it impossible. Then – a lawsuit claims – he got him a job at the grateful company that got the rigged bid for UNM’s basketball arena renovation.

I used to predict that Schmidly would be pushed out, pretty soon, at UNM. He’s so supremely, comprehensively, bad. But just as UNM won’t get rid of Coach Locksley, it won’t get rid of Schmidly. Why? Got me.

****************************
Update: Schmidly rides again.

… will be tracing the infiltration of the prescription drug trade into American medical schools. We’ll follow stories about pill mills housed inside universities. We’ll note increasing numbers of people going to medical school, and choosing anesthesiology and related fields, with the express purpose of being able to write prescriptions for millions of opioids and other drugs.

A hospital affiliated with Cornell and Columbia has recently removed an anesthesiologist drug dealer from its staff of physicians (he worked with other doctors there in the business). He prescribed pills for his girlfriend, who then sold them, mainly online.

His girlfriend is a medical student. Get the picture?

It’ll become clearer (“[I]n a growing number of states, deaths from prescription drugs now exceed those from motor vehicle accidents.”) in the next few months.

… a Room.

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

… A TV news program wanted linen-wrapped books chopped in half to fit the shallow, faux-shelves of a political interview program.

… [T]he-book-as-relic was forecasted by marketers. Ann Mack, director of trend-spotting for JWT New York, the marketing and advertising agency, noted in her trend report for the coming year that “objectifying objects,” she said, “would be a trend to watch.”

Quoting from her report, she added: “Here’s what we said: ‘The more that objects become replaced by digital virtual counterparts — from records and books to photo albums and even cash — watch for people to fetishize the physical object. Books are being turned into decorative accessories…

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

Originally, the client asked for German philosophers, said Mr. Wine, but switched to the classics to fit her budget.

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

A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.

“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.

“About what?” He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.

“About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.”

“The books?”

He nodded.

“Absolutely real–have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and–Here! Lemme show you.”

Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the “Stoddard Lectures.”

“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too–didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”

The Great Gatsby