Again, the same texts are predicated of differing subjects, which [M.V.] Dougherty said calls “into question the intelligibility of the texts manufactured by the two plagiarizing ghostwriters. Have they each produced coherent works of Catholic teaching, or are the plagiarizing documents simply theological word-salads?”

UD can’t wait for Adrian Vermeule’s and Edmund Waldstein’s Catholic state (see details here). UD calls it a cathophate, since it is something of a Catholic parallel to the caliphate some radical Muslims work toward.

In anticipation of that glorious day when the Catholic church is the state, UD has been reading the Catholic press.

The Catholic News Agency is a good source on the sort of discourse we can anticipate from our priest-rulers. Here is one article in that outlet about high-level Catholic preachment.

Many priests plagiarize or employ ghostwriters, or plagiarize and employ ghostwriters. The ghostwriters may themselves plagiarize. And since – again – many priests apparently plagiarize – a lot – the plagiarizers may well be plagiarizing from plagiarizers. The final product, preached by very busy important priest-rulers who use ghostwriters, may therefore be a plagiarized plagiarized ghostwritten statement of Truth to us, their subjects, from the authorities.

It is rather like the mysterious trinity, with Father being the King standing above us mouthing words he pretends to have written — words that tell us the truths we must believe and be ruled by; Son being the plagiarist who feeds stolen words to the words-mouthing Father; and Holy Ghostwriter being the ancient obscure force of originary plagiarism.

Central European University, under relentless pressure by Hungary’s popular prime minister to get the hell out, is about to do so. It will probably move to Vienna. Lots of people are upset about it. Hungary’s only world-class university has been chased away by paranoid hyper-nationalist know-nothings.

UD proposes that this might be for the best. The ultimate provincial backwater and proud of it; known, if known at all, for its suicide rate, Hungary, like our own Mississippi, elects chauvinistic dolts and ejects the non-doltish. Mississippi and Hungary are hemorrhaging population, whereas Vienna – precisely the sort of place (despite its own rightish political leadership) to which intelligent Hungarians flee – is growing.

If it is the will of people that the places they call home dissolve into nothingnesses ruled by Ubus, if they want to be places outsiders visit to track the spread of wisteria over Faulkner’s manse, or get soused with the ghost of Gyula Krúdy in his favorite watering hole, eh. It’s their right; precisely because of their “shabby littleness,” these places threaten no one.

Hungarians are the west’s Sentinelese. Really best not to intervene. Sad but true.

… at a George Washington University event next week, and of course she’s been reading and watching a lot of Lebowitz (interviews; this film; and Lebowitz’s agent is sending UD The Fran Lebowitz Reader). She’s been pondering Leibowitz as a person and as a writer, pondering the mix of character and personal history and intellect that makes a person a certain kind of writer, and in particular pondering Lebowitz in connection with UD‘s old friend David Kosofsky, who, like his well-known sister Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, died a few years ago, in his fifties.

While his sister became a famous academic writer, David died without producing the writing he had the ambition to write. This was partly because he lacked his sister’s focus – David tried on academia, tried on freelance travel writing, wrote some unpublished short stories, but nothing really took (a language teacher in Korea for many years, he published two books about English acquisition). Yet thinking about Lebowitz, who calls herself not just a blocked but a “blockaded” writer, UD wonders whether a certain complex attitude, an angle toward the world the two of them share, has something to do with this outcome.

On the simplest level, Lebowitz and Kosofsky are rather steadily depressed, extremely well-read Jewish intellectuals of a socially radical disposition. Yet because they actually seem not to believe in the possibility of even incremental (forget radical) human improvement – because both have the satirist’s amused pity for the incorrigible stupidity of the human race – their radicality is really what’s blocked. The blocked writing is the natural outcome of a wry hopelessness which may – as in the case of Lebowitz and, say, someone like Karl Kraus or Alfred Jarry – produce some hilarious satire which evokes the liberating and clarifying shock we feel when a writer aggressively strips us of all our delusions, but it won’t produce very much, possibly because the pull of the writer’s underlying hopelessness gets more and more powerful, moves more and more toward disappointment, with time and experience.

Think here of what George Orwell, in “Politics vs Literature,” says about Jonathan Swift. There’s much in the passage I’m about to cite that does not correspond to Lebowitz and Kosofsky – neither the point about authoritarianism, nor the point about envy of others who may be happy seems right – but there’s much in this passage that does correspond:

[T]he most essential thing in Swift is his inability to believe that life — ordinary life on the solid earth, and not some rationalized, deodorized version of it — could be made worth living. Of course, no honest person claims that happiness is now a normal condition among adult human beings; but perhaps it could be made normal, and it is upon this question that all serious political controversy really turns. Swift has much in common — more, I believe, than has been noticed — with Tolstoy, another disbeliever in the possibility of happiness. In both men you have the same anarchistic outlook covering an authoritarian cast of mind; in both a similar hostility to Science, the same impatience with opponents, the same inability to see the importance of any question not interesting to themselves; and in both cases a sort of horror of the actual process of life…

… Part of our minds — in any normal person it is the dominant part — believes that man is a noble animal and life is worth living: but there is also a sort of inner self which at least intermittently stands aghast at the horror of existence.

The energy despite the jaundice – yet, if my theory is right, that energy does indeed dissipate, with the satirist increasingly unwilling to face the horror-content she is bound to produce if she does in fact write. “All contemplation of oneself is unpleasant — even the contemplation of your own ideas is fairly nerve‑racking — and that’s what writing is,” says Lebowitz in a Paris Review interview. When your own ideas feature the ignobility and lack of interest of most other human beings, you may have difficulty taking them seriously enough to write about them. In one of the few unkind reviews of Lebowitz’s work I found, a Tablet writer says

[A] tastefully nihilistic pose has been [Lebowitz’s] fortune and, perhaps perversely, also her undoing as an artist. “I’m not interested in other people, so I don’t expect them to be interested in me,” she claims. Fair enough (if somewhat specious), except that the single requirement of the art of writing — to say nothing of the art of conversation — is exactly that.

Actually, it’s not that an interest in other people is a requirement of writing; it’s a requirement of deeper, non-satirical writing. Nor is such an interest a requirement of conversation; it is, again, only a requirement of conversation that goes beyond what can be enormously amusing (see Oscar Wilde’s Earnest) badinage and point-scoring. Iris Murdoch puts it this way:

[M]ost great writers have a sort of calm merciful vision because they can see how different people are and why they are different. Tolerance is connected with being able to imagine centers of reality which are remote from oneself. The great artist sees the vast interesting collection of what is other than himself and does not picture the world in his own image. I think this kind of merciful objectivity is virtue…

Lebowitz and Kosofsky’s charisma derives and derived in part, I’m thinking, from their patent, and very cool, uninterest in this sort of thing. Flaneuse and flaneur, they are and were the “idle observer” on the surface of things, the observer who makes out of a public/private experience involving a totally out-there walker’s life in the city and a totally in-there retreatist’s life inside one’s library, a fascinating, but perhaps ultimately pretty demoralizing, spectacle.

… in and that’s the kicker, ain’t it? I mean, lots of people are on them; but do the little buggers actually work?

The New York Review of Books (scroll down) has for awhile been the go-to place for essays by writers who question the utility of antidepressants for many (not all – some people do benefit from some antidepressants) of the people prescribed them; but obviously, as The Guardian‘s headline suggests, the subject – as vast stretches of Europe and America chomp down on them – is very much out there.

If the very question as posed seems to you outrageous, impossible, obscene, consider for a moment the way antidepressants are made. Not that you really want to know. It’s like the thing about how sausages are made. Better not to go there.

But let’s go. Let’s ask why Louisiana’s attorney general is suing Pfizer, maker of Zoloft. For $987 million. Or so.

Attorney General Buddy Caldwell claims Zoloft is barely more effective at treating depression than a placebo, but Pfizer has persuaded doctors and consumers otherwise…

Long before Zoloft was approved by the FDA, Pfizer knew it had “serious issues with efficacy” because in early Zoloft trials, the placebo group actually had better results, the state claims.

“These early trials showed that ‘placebo still seems to be the most effective group’ and that “there is still no striking evidence of beneficial drug effect with placebo often being the superior treatment,'” the complaint states.

“Nonetheless Pfizer chose to go forward in attempting FDA approval.”

The attorney general claims that to do this, Pfizer published only information that pertained to Zoloft efficacy, and suppressed conflicting studies.

Pfizer then engaged in a “ghostwriting program to misleadingly enhance Zoloft’s credibility,” the lawsuit states. [Note: Most American med schools have no policies at all on the practice of ghostwriting among their professors.]

… Louisiana claims that despite numerous studies that show that Zoloft is “no more effective than a sugar pill at treating depression,” Pfizer’s ad campaign included a large sales force that visited healthcare professionals on a routine basis, took them out to luxurious diners and events during which salespeople promoted Zoloft.

Laissez les bons temps roulez! And as for those sad sacks – let ’em eat expensive sugar pills.

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

One more note: Pfizer will settle. A thousand million dollars is nothing to Pfizer. Cost of doing business.

“The relationship between professors and their doctoral candidates has often been minimized down to a lazy wave-through.”

There are many illuminating statements in this interview with a German ghostwriter of dissertations.

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Markets work in funny ways.

Instead of creating a backlash against ghostwriters, however, cases like Guttenberg’s have actually had the opposite effect. His case was actually how many people first learned about the existence of doctoral ghostwriters at all. Since the beginning of the 2000’s, the number of ghostwriters … has risen and prices have fallen for the service.

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The interviewed ghostwriter shares the self-justifying bullshit that gets him through the night.

“Everything is for sale: sex, people, doctorates. I am only a cog in the wheels of capitalism.”

You keep telling yourself that, honey.

This Chesterton quotation is one of those very fine, very annoying things we say to each other at times like these, late Decembers, year ends, year beginnings. Yes yes soul must

clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

and louder sing and

You must change your life.

Take a look at the most significant publishing launch for the American new year if you want to know how tunefully renewed our souls are.

Our souls are clapping pills down their gullets.

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Still, we want what we want. We want vivacity, and we want wisdom. We want to feel we are truly alive, and we want to feel we are living in the truth.

This long clunky poem written in 1897 by Edwin Arlington Robinson – “Octaves” – gets at the problem kind of nicely… Or, since it’s not a very good poem, it gets at the problem in a way ol’ UD finds moving. The bad writing, the unachieved philosophical ambition, the naivete — UD likes these. She likes the peculiar way they’re deployed here, in this particular poem, which records the sound of one man trying to clap.

Some of it’s claptrap, actually, which UD also likes.

You’re welcome to whomp yourself up with Onward Christian Soldiers as you anticipate the new year; UD‘s looking for lyrics that capture the way we shout RETREAT just as loudly as we shout ADVANCE.

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

So let’s see. We’re not gonna do the whole poem because as I said it’s quite long, one eight-line verse after another after another.

Start here, in the middle of the eighth stanza.

[T]hough forlornly joyless be the ways
We travel, the compensate spirit-gleams
Of Wisdom shaft the darkness here and there,
Like scattered lamps in unfrequented streets.

Clunky, yes? Forlornly joyless feels not only redundant but unpretty as language; and the little points of light that lucid vivid soulfulness sheds are dully compared to streetlights… Reminds UD of Tennyson’s arch, also a dull image:

[A]ll experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

And this is also an image of the glinting into this dull world of the highly lit existence – the new life, the new soul, the new year – that beckons us.

Where does a dead man go?—The dead man dies;
But the free life that would no longer feed
On fagots of outburned and shattered flesh
Wakes to a thrilled invisible advance,
Unchained (or fettered else) of memory;
And when the dead man goes it seems to me
‘T were better for us all to do away
With weeping, and be glad that he is gone.

Let the dead bury the dead, says Robinson; or, rather, Robinson natters away about it while Blake, say, or Allen Ginsberg, or – a prose favorite of UD‘s – Henry Miller – gets it said faster and louder and more jazzily… But, again, UD finds the nattery quality here, the sense of Robinson talking to himself, inquiring rather than announcing, attractive, faithful to most people’s mental reality. A “thrilled invisible advance” is very nice — if one can free oneself from one’s past (UD‘s friend David Kosofsky, who died last year, once lamented in an email to her that he was

feeling self-loathing at never having wrestled my adolescent issues to even a stalemate.)

one can perhaps experience an exciting inward forward motion, a surge of open possibility — that new life everyone’s on about…

But this operation – this wrestling – will probably have to be pretty brutal — “be glad that he is gone.” Blake writes: “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” We may not have the stomach for this psychic savagery. We may prefer, like David, a weak form of wrestling which makes us hate our inability to have done with things and move on.

So through the dusk of dead, blank-legended,
And unremunerative years we search
To get where life begins, and still we groan
Because we do not find the living spark
Where no spark ever was; and thus we die,
Still searching, like poor old astronomers
Who totter off to bed and go to sleep,
To dream of untriangulated stars.

Very nice, no? Every now and then Robinson knocks one out of the park. Untriangulated stars is spectacular, as is blank-legended… And what’s the point here? Only that we set out on our new yearly reanimations all wrong; we assume some originary point of purity, of full light, from which we have strayed into the dark, and we piss our lives away trying to get back (like Citizen Kane with Rosebud) to that first principle, Gatsby’s just-flicked-on green light. We think of ourselves as that singular Thing, a Thing not yet triangulated (of course even if we get as far as accepting triangulation, that’s probably still tragic – think of the images of blighted stars amid the sound ones in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and in Absalom! Absalom!), not yet implicated in the convoluted compromised crowded human story, not yet part of a pattern… We piss our lives away dreaming of getting back to some …

Hold on. Gotta get on the train back to DC. Later.

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

We lack the courage to be where we are:—
We love too much to travel on old roads,
To triumph on old fields; we love too much
To consecrate the magic of dead things,
And yieldingly to linger by long walls
Of ruin, where the ruinous moonlight
That sheds a lying glory on old stones
Befriends us with a wizard’s enmity.

Not only dead people and their ghostly power over us; not only a disabling sense of our own now-dimmed-but-somehow-maybe-reignitable selves; we also have to reckon with the romance of escapism, the magic of dead things, the malignant wizardry of a world softened into friendly, familiar and lulling shapes. James Merrill, contemplating his love for Greece, writes

[H]ow I want
Essentials: salt, wine, olive, the light, the scream —
No! I have scarcely named you,
And look, in a flash you stand full-grown before me,
Row upon row, Essentials …

You want the hard sharp present-time clarity of things themselves; but even when you go to the trouble of moving to iconic things-in-themselves locations, things-in-themselves tend as soon as you’ve noted and named them to shrink into abstractions — the abstraction in this case being, well, Essentials…

Merrill writes as a poet desperate to write the world, to perceive and express reality. (Greece meant as much to him as it did to Jack Gilbert and as it does to Don DeLillo.) As does Robinson:

The prophet of dead words defeats himself:
Whoever would acknowledge and include
The foregleam and the glory of the real,
Must work with something else than pen and ink
And painful preparation: he must work
With unseen implements that have no names,
And he must win withal, to do that work,
Good fortitude, clean wisdom, and strong skill.

That last line is a real let-down; the stanza takes us from Keats (“pipe to the spirit/ditties of no tone”) to the Boy Scouts (fortitude, wisdom, skill). But it makes its point well enough: If you want to grasp and express concrete essentials, you are going to have to do a good deal of private soulwork, as Stephen Dedalus says at the end of Portrait:

I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

And – not to lay the discouragement on too thick, but … you recall how well Dedalus did at that ambition, right?

Still, writers can sometimes grasp essentials, internalize them… Or rather say they can metabolize them… Give them new life, a new soul.

Yes, medical “practice is informed by biased evidence summarized for us by people who have financial relationships with companies set to profit from alterations to our practice.” Yes indeed, industry-funded ghostwriters write articles promoting industry’s drugs and then place the articles in high-profile research journals where they’re read by unwary practitioners who duly prescribe them. Yes. But here’s one thing I’ll tell you for damn sure: If most of your journal’s advertising budget comes from industry, you’re not exactly going to resist the situation. You’re going to make yourself as comfy as you can in your favorite comfy chair and then you’re going to pour yourself an excellent scotch and then you’re going to accept the situation.

——————————–

See, it’s just like this Australian guy with his anti-depressant du jour, Valdoxan, which he’s touting in The Lancet. He has financial links to Servier, Valdoxan’s manufacturer. His paper’s been torn apart by scientists the world over, with one of them noting that “publication of this flawed paper will undoubtedly validate marketing of Valdoxan, and we are curious to see how many paid Valdoxan advertisements will be published in Elsevier journals.”

With anti-depressants as with sausages — You really don’t want to see how they’re made.

Charming post by UD‘s buddy Carl Elliott on the burgeoning culture of ghosting (which has a tendency to shade into plagiarism) in the American university bureaucracy.

The trend is getting pretty embarrassing. On more than one occasion, UD has felt that various officials of her own university would lend more dignity to important events if they read their speeches beforehand, so that we didn’t have to watch them struggle through new words and phrases.

But there’s something Carl overlooks in his review of ghosted speeches and columns by university administrators and faculty, and that’s credit. If Carl had agreed (he’s notoriously burdened by conscience) “to lend my name to an article which the public relations office would ghostwrite, but which would be published under my byline,” he’d have been able to list this publication, and many others (he was asked to underwrite a series) in his annual report to the dean, on his cv, etc. Med school professors do this all the time – they take credit for research articles written by other people in and around their labs. Which is why high-profile faculty members of this sort will list, I don’t know, 7,000 publications on their cvs. An entire industry of ghosted books, ghosted articles, and ghosted speeches written by pharma-paid copywriters, public relations people, and grad students, churns away for these people.

It’s the 200th anniversary of the notorious death of the great story writer Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), precursor of Kafka and assorted absurdists.

Like Kafka, Kleist (who early in life sat down on the shore of Wannsee Lake, shot a suicidal friend, and then shot himself) has this weird combination of clear, calm, confident, very expository-feeling prose, and brutally meaningless content. The stories are typically told from an extremely detached, affectlessly rational point of view – the narrator is simply a set of lucid eyes setting down what they see. Indeed sometimes the Kleist narrator, with his long paragraphs of diligent, painstaking description, is tiresome… Yet what these eyes see, as in Kleist’s greatest short story (if you ask me), “Saint Cecilia, or the Power of Music,” is pointless sadistic hatred, sudden communal psychosis, obsessive demented ritual unto death…

Four viciously anti-Catholic brothers, outfitted with weapons to destroy a church, hear, as they prepare to attack, the music of its mass – music so beautiful that it bears the congregants’ “souls, as if upon wings, through all the heaven of harmony” – and instantly the brothers throw down their weapons and become hysterical religious fanatics for life.

[T]he young men had led [a] ghost-like life [in the local insane aslyum] for six years… [T]hey slept little and tasted little, …no sound usually passed their lips, and …it was only at the hour of midnight that they rose from their seats, when, with voices loud enough to shatter the windows of the house, [in the most hideous and horrible voice] they sang the Gloria in excelsis.

Their mother finds them years later in the madhouse, where, overwhelmed by despair and confusion, she examines the score of the music played and sung that day:

She looked at the magical unknown signs, with which, as it seemed, some fearful spirit had mysteriously marked out its circle, and was ready to sink into the ground, when she found the “Gloria in excelsis” open. It seemed to her as if the whole terrors of music, which had proved the destruction of her sons, were whirling over her head; at the mere sight of the score her senses seemed to be leaving her, and with an infinitely strong feeling of humility and submission to the divine power, she heartily pressed the leaf to her lips, and then again seated herself in her chair.

Inside of a story whose authoritative narrator renders the world as a setting of utterly known signs sits a woman collapsing under a whirling, utterly unknown language. Her disharmonic sons’ first encounter with harmony (“beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure”) has undone them…

See, I think writers like Kleist and Kafka want to evoke what happens when our quotidian efforts to make sense of earthly meaninglessness and suffering are interrupted by epiphany — by entries into a fully meaningful world. Only our epiphanies aren’t beautiful and transcendent; they’re nightmarish. Like all epiphanies, they suddenly disclose to us what is really there; we see that there is a hand creating and directing our lives. But it is a hand whose absolute power is matched by its absolute, and seemingly malign, mystery. We can only agree to subjugate ourselves to that crushing enigma.

Or not. We can go on living the way we always have, suspecting now, however, that life is a crushing, sick joke. This is a guy option, as Christopher Hitchens makes clear in his essay about why women aren’t funny:

Male humor prefers the laugh to be at someone’s expense, and understands that life is quite possibly a joke to begin with — and often a joke in extremely poor taste. Humor is part of the armor-plate with which to resist what is already farcical enough… Whereas women, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is.

I mean, what’s all that Bach doing on the soundtrack of Shame, a film about sexual addiction? Aren’t Bach’s surpassing clarities, his you-could-weep harmonies, there as a counterpoint to the main character’s embroilment in ugliness, arbitrariness, and futility?

Always, Kleist and Kafka seem to say, we are at play between these two forces – the force of ugly visceral embroilment in a world that hurts and confuses us, and the counterforce of heavenly harmony whose voice is the voice of music, beauty. Their brilliance as writers is to retain narrators who dwell in the heavenly-harmonic even as the events they tell come from hell.

The absolutely contrary principle to the work and philosophy of Kleist, Kafka, and Hitchens is that of absolute confidence that the world has meaning, and transcendent meaning at that:

The sadness is that there is a hell for Hitch to go to. He was granted a long farewell, with the opportunity for reconsiderations and reconciliations with those he hated and those he hurt. He declined to take advantage of it. Mother Teresa is fine, and no doubt prays for her enemies, including that Hitchens would be delivered both from hell and the nihilistic oblivion, which he thought awaited him.

Simon Stern and Trudo Lemmens, law professors at the University of Toronto, propose using the RICO Act to make university ghost and guest writers “think twice before allowing their names to be used.” They talk about the fraud on prescribers (of the drugs the articles promote), article readers, and patients.

What they don’t include is the fraud against their academic institutions. Every year, as they point out, professors submit annual reports to their deans, describing their research productivity. Pharma-fraudsters get monetary bonuses that should go to professors who write their own articles. This unfairness harms morale and collegiality; it also cheapens the institution by associating it with bogus, corporate-generated, research.

Universities, Lemmens and Stern write, “are reluctant to punish prestigious doctors who otherwise reflect credit on the institution and often help impress donors.”

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One thing that’s constantly amazed UD as she has written this blog is the way corporations pretty much do everything for faculty – not just write their articles. Chandru Rajam, recently a (not terribly well-received; too busy to teach… but who cares… just a visiting professor… only fucks up GW students for two semesters) colleague of UD‘s in the business school, has an outsourced grading business that will relieve UD of all grading responsibilities. She never needs to see a student paper! Add ghost-writing companies, corporate-provided PowerPoints (all you have to do is read them out loud! exam questions included!), etc. etc., and it’s clear that postmodern university professors who are willing to pay don’t have to do anything.

On top of this, UD lives in Washington – the richest metropolitan region in the country. While spending her money to make other people do everything for her, she has an immense variety of spas from which to choose.

There’s nothing new or interesting about these two stories. A politician and a reporter plagiarize. As is true of all the plagiarists UD has covered on this blog over the years, the reporter is a serial plagiarist. As is true of most plagiarizing politicians she has covered on this blog, this latest one, Scott Brown, barely deigns to notice the event, calling it all “silly.” So what if his statement (on his website) of his personal values was actually Elizabeth Dole’s statement of her personal values?

Wendy Kaminer comments.

[G]hostwriting and plagiarism are not “nothing.” Speaking for yourself, you inevitably reveal yourself, intentionally or not; pretending to speak for yourself, while hiring others to speak for you, you remain in the shadows. Who are these people we send to Washington to run the country? Who knows?

Who are these reporters and opinion writers we read? Who writes the research papers clinicians depend upon in prescribing therapies and pills and devices?

Ghostwriters, guest writers, public relations people, lobbyists, interns, research assistants, lab assistants, graduate students – there’s an entire simulacrum industry now. It stands between us and the truth.

… UD‘s friend Jonathan Leo has a new article out about the pharma-sponsored ghostwriting of seemingly neutral scientific articles. It’s a model of lucidity, first defining “ghostwriting,” then clarifying all the ways in which it’s a deceptive and destructive practice, and finally proposing new rules for the submission of medical research papers.

The article appears in a subscription-only journal; but here are some excepts.

Transparent and honest authorship would seem to be a bare minimum standard for professors publishing medical research.

Indeed, imagine how your colleagues in any other field would respond if they found out that you didn’t write the articles listed under your name on your cv… That the articles were in fact written by a ghostwriting firm being paid by a corporation – the way, for instance, the makers of Paxil are accused of paying a firm $120,000 to ghostwrite a book representing itself as objective but in fact constituting an extended advertisement for Paxil. “Ghostwriting,” Leo points out, “is performed by writers who have undisclosed conflict-of-interest and are paid well by pharmaceutical companies to ensure that the manuscripts contain the chosen marketing messages.” Only in the American medical school would discovering this deception occasion no response.

While the average reader likely interprets ‘editorial assistance’ as help with grammar or improvements to the overall readability of the article, in reality such ‘assistants’ make major contributions to papers, and would commonsensically be considered as co-authors.

It’s common in corporate ghostwritten articles not to mention the ghostwriter(s) at all, or to hide a thank you in a small note at the end of the piece. And, as Leo points out, it’s just as common to characterize their contribution as purely ‘editorial assistance,’ when it’s often far more substantive than that.

A few journals have instituted ghostwriting-resistant policies, among them Neurology:

[Its editors] require that any paid medical writer be included in the author byline accompanied by full disclosure.

… on ghost-written professors:

Why do academics serve as authors on scientific articles they did not write, using research they did not perform? Because they are rewarded, both by their universities and by their colleagues for how much they publish and for its prominence.

Whoops! Plus I own the company that makes the stuff!

Labrie’s take on this is great: “The one that is the first author has got the responsibility.”

It’s great because, you know, quite a few medical journal papers have like five to twenty authors, with only the first author (maybe – maybe a drug company got the whole thing ghostwritten) actually having any involvement in experimenting and writing and shit like that which you might associate with experimenting and writing…

So put quotations marks, in that last sentence, around each use of the word author and you begin to see Labrie’s point.

Some of those not-first writers, let’s speculate, had little to do with the article; their names were plastered on it like some cheesy face cream because people know who they are, and that adds prestige. Why in hell – since their only involvement is to be informed of when the article comes out and instruct their secretaries to add its title to their list of publications – should they bother listing conflicts of interest?

While experts contacted by Reuters Health say that none of the anti-aging creams available to consumers has been proven to work better than a simple moisturizer, some products still run well over $100.

One way to justify those exorbitant price tags is to tout “clinically proven” …

(Why isn’t Suze Orman talking to women about one hundred dollar moisturizers?)

Journals, concludes one editor, are “the marketing arm of the pharma industry.”

Ghostwriters are the Navy Seals of academia. They go in there with their special skills and materials, write an article on behalf of their employer (a pharmaceutical company), target a professor willing to put her name on the piece so that it looks like research rather than advertising, and publish it in a high-profile journal.

Like the Seals, they are too modest – and their vocation too top-secret – to take credit. They are the unsung heroes of big pharma.

Take the wonderfully named middle man Mittleman. Maclean’s can phone her all it likes, but she ain’t talkin. Her employers wouldn’t like it. Plus she’s preparing for future missions.

A former ghost spoke to a recent gathering of academics interested in the subject. She confirmed that she would

approach academics on behalf of drug companies and withhold information about her relationship with the industry. “I was asked to identify myself as a writer for the medical education company,” she says, adding that her range of involvement with a researcher could be anything from editing a manuscript, to writing the entire thing under a researcher’s byline.

Remarkably incurious, isn’t it, for Thought Leaders not to wonder why a person would beg to write their articles for them and get them placed for them and all… I guess if you think of yourself as a really important person you figure even thinking and writing are kind of beneath you… ?