Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14009

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Kaiser J.
Ethics. Senate inquiry on research conflicts shifts to grantees
Science. 2008 Jun 27; 320:(5884):1708
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/320/5884/1708

Abstract:

Senate investigators began poking around academic medical centers last summer, looking for information on who was receiving corporate money and who was reporting it in compliance with conflict-of-interest rules. At the same time, they asked drug companies to name whom they were paying, and how much. This month, the two halves of the bomb came together, revealing discrepancies with a bang. The fallout struck Harvard Medical School and the affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston. Congressional sleuths allege that three faculty psychiatrists failed to properly report hundreds of thousands of dollars of outside income.

As investigators under Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) sift through the cases, the biomedical community is facing a couple of angst-inducing questions: Will there be more bombshells? And how will grant overseers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and academic deans respond? The short answer is, yes, Grassley plans more detonations. The senator has said he is investigating about 30 individuals at 20 universities who may have broken federal conflict-of-interest reporting rules. This week, he asked Stanford University why it did not require that a faculty psychiatrist report the full value of his $6 million in stock in a company that makes a drug being studied in an NIH-funded trial that the psychiatrist oversees. Stanford was preparing a statement as Science went to press (ScienceNOW, 24 June).

Universities, meanwhile, say they’re scrambling to tighten procedures to track conflicts, hoping to reassure the public and stave off more stringent measures that they say could stifle cooperation with industry…

Keywords:
Publication Types: News MeSH Terms: Academic Medical Centers Biomedical Research/ethics Conflict of Interest* Disclosure* Drug Industry*/economics Financing, Government Humans National Institutes of Health (U.S.)*/economics Research Personnel/ethics* Research Support as Topic* United States