E-DRUG: Academic conflicts of interest
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An interesting report of a paper presented at American Association
for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) regarding conflicts of interest
among academic biotechnology researchers follows:
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[snip]
Finally, a paper presented at this summer's AAAS meeting reports on
a curious trend that may or may not be a problem. Sheldon Krimsky, I
think an economist at Tufts University in the Boston area, did a study
on the financial interests of biomedical researchers. He examined 789
biomedical papers published by 1105 scientists based at Massachusetts
universities in 1992. In 34 percent of the papers (267 papers in
total), at least one of the authors stood to make money from the results
they were reporting, either because they held a key patent, or were an
officer of a biotechnology company exploiting the research, or served on
the scientific advisory board of a biotech firm. None of these 267 papers
mentioned the fact that one or more of the authors had a financial
interest in the results. Given that Krimsky was unable to check if
authors owned stocked in biotech companies, or were being paid as
consultants, he suspects the percentage will be much greater than 34%.
His argument is that the problem isn't that the quality of the
research is being affected (science still has to be replicatable), but
that these financial ties should be disclosed in such publications.
A minor issue you might think, but in some cases, the stakes are
high and the politics a real mess. A case in point is a proposed merger
of the Stanford Medical complex and the University of California - San
Francisco Medical complex. It is a complicated affair involving the
transferring of public properties to a private organization. While
supporters argue that it will lead to efficiencies in services provided,
detractors argue that the purported gains are exaggerated, and that the
real reason is that many of the people involved in the mergers (doctors,
board of directors, etc.) have stakes in the large biotech industry in
the Bay Area (near Stanford, California?) stakes that would stand to gain
much from a merger, since the combined facilities would be an even more
potent testing grounds for new discoveries.
[snip]
Greg Aharonian
Internet Patent News Service
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James Love | Center for Study of Responsive Law
P.O. Box 19367 | Washington, DC 20036 | http://www.cptech.org
voice 202.387.8030 | fax 202.234.5176 | love@cptech.org
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