The world’s poster child for academic conflict of interest will soon arrive on your shores to grant his blessing to your new research center! You went right to the very top – the US of A’s own Charles Nemeroff – for the inaugural lecture. Perennial object of United States Senate interest because of his fascinating use of taxpayer money, Nemeroff promises to bring to you Brits, as you set out on your own research programs, the same … fascinating ethos he has brought to his own… peripatetic career.

As an American, I can’t hide my pride in the way England, once our ruler, has now summoned one of us for inspiration and advice on how best to pursue scientific endeavors.

Naturally, given Nemeroff’s record, there are nay-sayers at your institute.

Derek Summerfield, honorary senior lecturer at the Institute, wrote in the BMJ, formerly called the British Medical Journal, last week that the Institute of Psychiatry’s lauding of Professor [Charles] Nemeroff as “one of the world’s leading experts” showed how psychiatric academe “sails blithely on as if such revelations beg no broader questions about its associations and supposed scientific independence.”

Yes, sail blithely on! You have much to learn from Charles Nemeroff about grantsmanship. Good show!

They are Huh? presidents. The things they do are so nutty, so destructive, that you simply have to sit back and wonder.

These are the university presidents with multiple ongoing national scandals to their names, the university presidents always reeling from massive sex scandals to massive money scandals, never quite catching up with anything… You can sort of see the sweat dripping off of their faces as they stonewall on this one, pass the buck on that one…

Shalala – University of Miami – is still buffeted by the rioting football players scandal and the Nevin Shapiro scandal, but now, in addition to those, she’s got the Pascal Goldschmidt scandal. Much of her medical school faculty is up in arms about Dean Goldschmidt and his, er, management techniques… But Shalala says nothing; whether it’s Goldschmidt, or her other proud med school appointment – Charles Nemeroff, she’s just going to keep on keeping on thank you very much…

Joel, of Yeshiva, is a yet stranger case, a man whose tenure has witnessed the deification and then rapid de-deification of trustees Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, the existence of a board of trustees (all male, natch; women would be against Yeshiva’s religion) so rife with conflict of interest it became a laughingstock, and a decades-long sex scandal whose legal costs promise to set YU back even more than the $150 million or so it lost because of Bernie and Ezra.

This sex scandal, this latest thing, involving rabbis abusing boys at Yeshiva’s university-run high school, isn’t raising Joel’s game any.

[One of the abused] also said that he reported the abuse to Y.U.’s current president, Richard Joel, before and after Joel took up the post in 2003. Joel did not launch an investigation into the abuse allegations until they were published in [a newspaper].

At first, through a spokesman, he said that Y.U. had retained the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell to “assist” in the investigation. Later, he said that Sullivan & Cromwell’s investigation would be independent.

Same old same old. Denial, number one. Number two, try to control everything. Number three, pushed to the absolute effing wall, begin – tentatively, shamelessly, angrily, self-righteously – dealing with it.

… your university hospital is the most treacherous part of campus. There’s lots of money at stake, so corruption is highly likely. Conflict of interest among your professors may be rampant. There’s always someone on the staff stealing oxycontin to sell it. Some of your anesthesiologists are addicts.

Cowboys on the surgery team try this and that without bothering with the institutional review board. Since you don’t really pay attention to the doctors you allow to affiliate, some of them will turn out to run pill mills or, like UCLA’s Arnold Klein, will embarrass you in other ways.

You try to make the hospital a big profit center, but that almost never works. Meanwhile, as in this story from the University Medical Center Göttingen, some of your surgeons are managing to make it work quite nicely on a personal basis.

A surgeon identified as Dr. Aiman O. is suspected of fraudulently manipulating dozens of his patients’ test results, making them appear sicker than they were to get them liver transplants more quickly — and possibly putting them ahead of people who more desperately needed them. The case first emerged in late July at the University Medical Center Göttingen, in the northern German state of Lower Saxony, from where the senior physician has been suspended since November for allegedly tampering with some 23 transplant cases. A gastroenterologist suspected of involvement has also been suspended.

There’s huge money in this. Truly rich, truly desperate people will pay amazing sums for an organ, and all you have to do is shove aside other sick people who’ve been following the rules and waiting.

… it could win some serious journalism awards. Even more than scandal-rich University of Miami, Columbia University, with its notorious business school professors, insider-trader-tinged medical school professor, and – most recently – Medicare fraud-accused faculty (that last one cost the university a million dollars in settlement money), represents a spectacular opportunity for ambitious young journalists.

They simply have to start bundling. Rather than deal with each breaking story, the Spectator staff needs to pull them all together in a long series of articles featuring financial corruption at the university.

It’s hard to say. This directory page is the best I can do, and it might not be the same guy. But a news article about him says he’s an “assistant professor at the New York University School of Medicine.”

As you probably know, medical schools are notorious for handing out the title “professor” to pretty about anyone who hangs around the hospital wearing a white coat. This courtesy isn’t a very good idea, especially at a time when doctors are being arrested for running pill mills all over the country (especially in Florida). Castronuovo faces ten years in prison for writing oxy prescriptions like a bat out of hell.

… who cannot seem to keep their names out of the papers.

Their universities continue to praise them to the skies — see here, here, and here — and yet the New York Times and various United States senators and various university colleagues are constantly writing in very negative terms about these guys, sending them angry letters, suggesting they’re corrupt and destructive…

Biederman, Nemeroff, and Zdeblick aren’t the only controversial high-profile medical school professors in America; but no other professors have been so enduringly under attack – for conflict of interest, for suppression of negative evidence, for personal greed – by the media, professional organizations, and Congress. All three men, for years and years and years, have been accused of serious misbehavior. Their names are always in the papers, and always for the wrong reasons.

Zdeblick is -for the umpteenth time – in today’s headlines.

When does a university decide that a prominent, grants-getting, journal-editing, mover-shaker on its faculty has become so compromised that he or she should go? Emory University let Nemeroff go, but the University of Miami immediately panted after him, and has worshipfully adored him ever since… I mean, you have to wonder: Do the leaders of these universities even know they have a problem?

And it’s adorable! To watch Tom and Charlie consort with one another year after year despite all the conflicts and penalties and sanctions and recusals and rules and everything!!!

[Charles Nemeroff] repeatedly contacted [Thomas] Insel for help with NIH grants, including attempts to renew and relocate his work at Emory.

Plus!

At Miami, [conflict of interest will be] handled by the medical school’s dean, Pascal J. Goldschmidt, who hired Dr. Nemeroff after conferring with Dr. Insel. The dean subsequently said that he understood the concern over Dr. Nemeroff’s track record, and that he would be “scrutinizing his activities” to be sure he reports all future income from outside companies.

Dr. Goldschmidt was found last month to have underreported his income from service on the boards of two outside companies.

The medical school at Tufts has a little of everything.

It has the heroic Dr Jerome Kassirer, who writes, and testifies in front of Congress, about the “thinly disguised bribes” that pill and device marketers offer to physicians.

It has the appallingly inept Dr. Kajoko Kifuji, who does little these days other than testify in multiple courtrooms about her malpractice.

And it has, most recently, a whole bunch of cardiologists who seem to be involved, along with the device manufacturer Medtronic, in a false claims investigation.

The University of Florida medical school received an F … on a scorecard designed to measure ethical policies on professors’ relationship with the pharmaceutical industry, the Pew Prescription Project announced Tuesday.

… The Gainesville school flunked because it refused to provide information, according to the 2009 American Medical Student Association PharmFree Scorecard. UF spokeswoman Melanie Fridl Ross said Tuesday, “We aren’t sure what happened with respect to the AMSA survey, but . . . shortly after being named interim dean of the College of Medicine last June, Dr. Michael L. Good appointed a task force to review and update the existing policies . . . on industry conflicts of interest and industry-academic relations . . . “

They can’t even find the survey.