Deterioration in science integrity....
Me, again!
Obtained from elsewhere.....
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Subject: Academic Researchers' Conflicts of Interest Go Unreported
This morning's *New York Times* includes an article: "Academic
Researchers' Conflicts of Interest Go Unreported" by Gardiner Harris.
Here are some excerpts:
[begin excerpts]
Few universities make required reports to the government about the
financial conflicts of their researchers, and even when such conflicts
are reported, university administrators rarely require those researchers
to eliminate or reduce these conflicts, government investigators found.
In a report expected to be made public on Thursday, Daniel R. Levinson,
the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services,
said 90 percent of universities relied solely on the researchers
themselves to decide whether the money they made in consulting and other
relationships with drug and device makers was relevant to their
government-financed research.
And half of universities do not ask their faculty members to disclose
the amount of money or stock they make from drug and device makers, so
the potential for extensive conflicts with their government-financed
research is often known only to the researchers themselves, the report
concluded.
The report is the latest in a series of investigations that have found
that conflicts of interest in academic research are at best lightly
supervised.
<snip>
Eric G. Campbell, an associate professor at the Institute for Health
Policy at Harvard Medical School, said universities had no interest in
putting real limits on the incomes of their star researchers for fear
that those researchers would leave for institutions with fewer restrictions.
"This report clearly raises the question of whether these institutions
are capable of managing these conflicts themselves," Dr. Campbell said.
In 2006, 41 universities reported to N.I.H. that 165 researchers who had
received grants from the agency had potential financial conflicts.
Hundreds of universities receive such grants, and surveys show that
about half of academic researchers report having financial relationships
with drug makers.
So the reported conflicts probably represent just a fraction of the
actual number of conflicts.
Most of the reported conflicts involved equity ownership in companies
that could be affected by the results of government-financed research.
In only a third of the cases did the universities specify to the
government the size of the financial conflict and, among those, six had
equity stakes valued at greater than $100,000.
But in only 29 of the cases did the universities require researchers to
reduce or eliminate their stakes.
[end excerpts]
The article is online at:
<http://bit.ly/24HrGx>
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BMJ
>
> Obtained from elsewhere.....
A lot of this is courtesy of the Bayh-Dole Act.
When I doing my Ph. D. residency, I already had the sense that advice that
profs used to give as a service to students, even those outside of their
departments or disciplines, was becoming a source of revenue. So, if a
student has a problem figuring out, say, a certain differential equation,
they may have to pay money to get assistance.
BMJ
> On Nov 19, 7:48 pm, BMJ <owlstretchingt...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Me, again! wrote:
>>
>>> Obtained from elsewhere.....
>> A lot of this is courtesy of the Bayh-Dole Act.
>>
>> When I doing my Ph. D. residency, I already had the sense that advice that
>> profs used to give as a service to students, even those outside of their
>> departments or disciplines, was becoming a source of revenue. So, if a
>> student has a problem figuring out, say, a certain differential equation,
>> they may have to pay money to get assistance.
>
Well, I knew of some who were running consulting companies, so if a student
needed advice or assistance, they would have to go to the firm rather than
the prof.