Karen Wagner, a psychiatry professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, seems to sound a repetitive theme in her work: Accept undisclosed money from drug companies; put your name on articles substantively ghostwritten for drug companies; and just generally over many years demonstrate the sort of behavior that gets you … named president of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Rewards in this field, after all, go to people able to increase the probability that drug firms – eager, in the latest case involving Wagner, to rain anti-depressants upon the heads of our teeniest tots – will get FDA approval for their products.

Does the pill do anything a placebo doesn’t… ? Might it have dire side effects… ?

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UD‘s friend Barney suggests some ways out.

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Oh – and speaking of kiddies and the makers of fun adorable stuff for them to play with, like Risperdal blocks – a new movie about that drug is coming out, and UD is way excited at the possibility that it will star one of the most… intriguing characters we’ve met on this blog: Harvard’s Joseph Biederman.

Her critics become more and more shrill as Karen Wagner’s deception generates outrage; yet Wagner, like the university that employs her, remains absolutely silent.

The University of Texas has issued a few We don’t know shit but uh when we get a chance we’ll look into it statements in response to Senator Charles Grassley’s repeated letters to it about the vice-chair of the psychiatry department’s way-lucrative, hidden conflicts of interest, and of course the campus can’t be happy that Grassley  just reported her to the Health and Human Services inspector general.

In his latest letter, the Iowa Republican says that the amount Wagner didn’t report may be as high as $230,000. The university’s counsel told the Dallas Morning News last week that it has been investigating Wagner for two weeks -– though it got the first letter on the issue eight months ago.

But hey.  If you were an office of sponsored research guy, and you had a choice between going to a football game and staring at a big ol’ Adzillatron, and shuffling through disclosure papers from Wagner in which she makes a fool of you to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, what would you do?

That Texas Adzillatron — the world’s largest — has UD thinking.  What if, during major athletic contests, with the whole nation watching, the university were to pause the stream of ads for a few moments and flash the names of its professors who’ve lied about outside income?  You know – list their names, departments, and the amount of money they didn’t tell anybody about over, say, the last ten years.  Also any sanctions imposed.  If UT takes disclosure seriously, this would be real disclosure.   It would also embarrass Wagner and others, thereby discouraging fellow professors of psychiatry from following their path.

It involves drug company payments to Karen Wagner, a psychiatrist at the University of Texas. Big payments, over many years, for her touting the benefits of various dangerous concoctions for the most vulnerable among us — children.

The Commission’s very hush-hush. Wagner never reported any of this money to her university. Well, once she reported she’d gotten six hundred dollars. That left multiple hundreds of thousands that she concealed.

The university thought it’d be a great idea to put Wagner on a committee reviewing other professors’ conflict of interest forms.

Wagner knows how to keep a secret:

In March 2006, Dr. Wagner was being deposed in a case on Paxil. During that deposition, Dr. Wagner was asked how much money she had taken from drug companies over the previous five years.

Her response? She said, and I quote, “I don’t know.” In fact, she testified that she couldn’t even estimate how much money she received from the drug companies.

The latest on the Wagner Commission:

An influential U.S. senator has reported a University of Texas researcher’s financial relationship with a drug company to the top investigator at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, sent a letter to the University of Texas System in September raising concerns that child pharmacology researcher Karen Wagner had not properly disclosed her financial connections with drug companies. He reported her in a letter to the Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General.

… correcting UD‘s misunderstanding of the nature of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston:

First, disclosure: I am on the verge of graduating from UTMB with a Ph.D in ethics & medical humanities, so my affiliation most assuredly colors my views.

Second, some of my academic work involves COIs in research and medicine.

But I do think it is important to understand a bit more of the local context re UTMB. UTMB is indeed part of the UT system, but to assert that it shares in the Adzillatron and what that represents is something of an error or at least an oversimplification. Some knowledge of Texas politics is required in order to explain why. UTMB may “share” in the Adzillatron, but its share is pitiful compared to the two flagship institutions, UT-Austin, and Texas A&M. These two are both extremely wealthy institutions, with literally every other UT scrabbling for scraps. UTMB itself is near the bottom of this heap, since their very charter declares that the mission of the school is expressly to provide indigent care.

There is a perception that the regents have grown tired of this mission, such that the funds allocated to UTMB to provide indigent care have consistently crept lower. The regents very nearly ended the school’s clinical operations “due” to damage caused by Hurricane Ike. Only a well-positioned and powerful representative in the Texas Capitol prevented this from occurring.

None of this is to offer any opinion on the events surrounding Dr. Wagner. But it is inaccurate to argue that because UTMB is part of the UT system, it shares equally in the Adzillatron culture. UTMB has historically lacked the funds to even fulfill its charter; wealthy donors and endowments do not generally come UTMB’s way.

UD is very grateful to the reader for this clarification.