October 22, 2005

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Conflicts of Interest in the American Academies

Hot on the heels of our discussion about the line between basic and applied science comes this story in the Washington Monthly by Shannon Brownlee. It is an indictment of the cozy relationship between biomedical researchers and Big Pharma, and it sets the scene by explaining this piece of legislation, which I don’t know anything about:

How did we get to this point? What effect is industry influence having on the treatment of patients? And why are the medical journals not more vigilant to weed out papers that have been distorted by conflict of interest? The answers to these questions begin, oddly enough, with an amendment to U.S. patent law called the Bayh-Dole Act. Passed in 1980, Bayh-Dole for the first time permitted universities to commercialize products and inventions without losing their federal research funding, the seed money for innovative research. The brainchild of George Keyworth II, President Reagan’s science advisor, who was watching the United States get beaten in world markets by the Japanese, Bayh-Dole was intended to stimulate advanced technological invention and speed its transfer from university labs into private industry, where it could be put to work spurring U.S. productivity.

It seemed like a win-win proposition. Indeed, Bayh-Dole has helped launch the biotech industry and has propelled several life-saving products to market. The basic research behind Gleevec, for instance, an incredibly effective new anti-cancer drug, was done by a university scientist. The drug’s manufacturer, Novartis, stepped in and provided additional funding for development. In 1984, private companies contributed a mere $26 million to university research budgets. By 2000, they were ponying up $2.3 billion, an increase of 9,000 percent that provided much needed funds to universities at a time when the cost of doing medical research was skyrocketing.

Brownlee goes on to explain that “[a]t MIT, 31 percent of the science and engineering faculty has outside income; at Stanford Medical School, it’s 20 percent.”

Turns out there are some parallels to the debate over objectivity and conflict of interest in the news business here — except that mainstream academia seems to have come to a conclusion exactly opposite that of mainstream journalism:

“Lots of eminent people took great offense at being accused of being influenced,” Relman told me recently. “‘What an insulting thing to say. I value my reputation; doctors and scientists know best. Trust us.’ I spent the first 25 years of my career doing clinical research and being one of them, and I know the feeling.” As Harvey Lodish, professor of biology at MIT, huffed to Technology Review in 1984, when Relman first required disclosure at the Journal, “Scientists have all kinds of private consulting arrangements with biotechnology companies and many own stock in these companies, but that’s nobody’s business. It has nothing to do with the quality of their research.”

“They actually believe that they aren’t influenced,” says Angell. […]

Then there’s this:

A journalist friend of mine recently told me about the day his then-girlfriend, who was a neurosurgeon, received a check for several hundred dollars in the mail, along with a note from a drug company representative. It seemed his girlfriend had made favorable mention of a particular drug during a lecture she delivered a few days earlier, and the money was just a little thank you from the manufacturer. When my friend told her she could not in good conscience cash the check—that it was a conflict of interest—she looked at him, he said, as if he were speaking in some unintelligible language.

You always have to be wary when someone is arguing from anecdote, but still — what an anecdote!

If you are interested in academia, journalism, or both, go take a look at this article. And then I’m curious to know if you think this should change the way we think about the academy/industry crossover? Or is this an overly alarmist piece of reporting?