'Drug Company Money is Undermining Science'

Charles Seife:

How Drug Company Money is Undermining Science, by Charles Seife, Scientific American: ...In the past few years the pharmaceutical industry has come up with many ways to funnel large sums of money—enough sometimes to put a child through college—into the pockets of independent medical researchers who are doing work that bears, directly or indirectly, on the drugs these firms are making and marketing. The problem is not just with the drug companies and the researchers but with the whole system—the granting institutions, the research labs, the journals, the professional societies, and so forth. No one is providing the checks and balances necessary to avoid conflicts. Instead organizations seem to shift responsibility from one to the other, leaving gaps in enforcement that researchers and drug companies navigate with ease, and then shroud their deliberations in secrecy.

“There isn't a single sector of academic medicine, academic research or medical education in which industry relationships are not a ubiquitous factor,” says sociologist Eric Campbell, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Those relationships are not all bad. After all, without the help of the pharmaceutical industry, medical researchers would not be able to turn their ideas into new drugs. Yet at the same time, Campbell argues, some of these liaisons co-opt scientists into helping sell pharmaceuticals rather than generating new knowledge.

The entanglements between researchers and pharmaceutical companies take many forms. There are speakers bureaus: a drugmaker gives a researcher money to travel—often first class—to gigs around the country, where the researcher sometimes gives a company-written speech and presents company-drafted slides. There is ghostwriting: a pharmaceutical manufacturer has an article drafted and pays a scientist (the “guest author”) an honorarium to put his or her name on it and submit it to a peer-reviewed journal. And then there is consulting: a company hires a researcher to render advice. ...

It is not just an academic problem. Drugs are approved or rejected based on supposedly independent research. When a pill does not work as advertised and is withdrawn from the market or relabeled as dangerous, there is often a trail of biased research and cash to scientists. ...

The scientific community's answer to the conflict-of-interest problem is transparency. Journals, grant-making institutions and professional organizations press researchers to openly declare ... when they have any entanglements that might compromise their objectivity. ... It is an honor system. Researchers often fail to report conflicts of interest—sometimes because they do not even realize that they present a problem. ...

In theory, there is a backup system. ... When a scientist fails to report such a conflict, the university or hospital he or she works for is supposed to spot it and report it. And when a university or hospital is not doing its job catching conflicted research, then the government agency that funds most of that research—the National Institutes of Health—is supposed to step in. Unfortunately, that backup system is badly broken. ...