In June, I will be returning to Washington for the annual Pharmed Out conference, a project located at Georgetown University Medical Center. It is one of my favorite events of the year, in part because of the wide array of academics, journalists, and activists who attend, but mainly because of its extraordinarily committed, outspoken director, Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, and her merry band of student volunteers. Adriane agreed to an interview by email. Part 1 appears below. I will post Part 2 next week.
Would it be fair to say that your project was funded by a felony?
Yes, we were funded by the Attorney General Consumer and Prescriber Grant program, a novel and never-to-be-repeated program that resulted from a settlement between Pfizer and all 50 states and the District of Columbia. We promised so much that before we got the grant, the grant administrators asked us to cut do…
From Wikipedia, a 1947 photograph of Wittgenstein by Ben Richards
“I first saw Wittgenstein in the Michaelmas term of 1938, my first term at Cambridge. At a meeting of the Moral Science Club, after the paper for the evening was read and the discussion started, someone began to stammer a remark. He had extreme difficulty in expressing himself and his words were unintelligible to me. I whispered to my neighbor: ‘Who is that?’: he replied, ‘Wittgenstein.’”
So begins Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, by Norman Malcolm, a student of Wittgenstein’s at Cambridge and his lifelong friend. It is a small book, published over half a century ago, but its influence would be hard to overstate. Not many philosophical books have created as many disciples. If philosophers were evangelists (and so…
Let’s start with a quiz. Can you tell which of these awards is real?
A) The Exxon Valdez Prize in Environmental Ethics
B) The Goldman Sachs Endowment in Business Ethics
C) The Richard Milhous Nixon Award for Ethics in Government
D) The Pfizer Fellowship in Bioethics
If you guessed D), you win. Yes, it is true that Pfizer has a rap sheet filled with felonies; yes, the company exploited Nigerian children in one of the deadliest research scandals in recent memory; and yes, in 2009 it paid out the (then) largest criminal fine in American history. But what better way to atone for past wrongdoing than a generous cash award to a bioethicist? The Pfizer Fellowship in Bioethics is a $100,000 grant that allows “researchers to explore ethical issues that arise in the everyday practice of contemporary medicine,” such as “conflicts of interest.” This year’s…
These are not happy times for the embattled drug maker AstraZeneca. The patent for Seroquel has expired; the company’s profits have plummeted; and its CEO, David Brennan, has just been escorted to the exit door. It seems like a good time to look back at sunnier days, when Seroquel, the ex-blockbuster antipsychotic, was a hot new drug for bipolar disorder.
As it happens, I recently got an email from “David Bronstein,” the medical ghostwriter who appears in my book, White Coat, Black Hat. Bronstein (a pseudonym) is a developmental biologist who provided some of the book’s best stories, especially his brutally hilarious accounts of his work for a “medical communications” company in the United Kingdom. He was writing to tell me about a branded AstraZeneca t-shirt he had acquired at a conference many years ago. It was designed to promote Seroquel. “Get yourself…
Why should students study bioethics at a university plagued with bioethical scandals? That’s the uncomfortable question here in Minnesota, where our bioethics graduate program is housed in an academic health center seemingly intent on making its way into the Guinness Book of World Records for Disgraceful Behavior. Research death, corruption, scientific fraud, invasion of privacy, nepotism, double-dipping, employment discrimination, manipulation of research data, improper industry influence, a U.S. Senate investigation into hidden conflicts of interest: As soon as the shock of one revelation begins to fade, the press uncovers another one. Which raises the question: Wouldn’t being admitted to study bioethics at the University of Minnesota be a little like winning a fellowship to study ethics in the Nixon White House?
The problem is not unique to Minnesota. Like parasites in the …
Everyone knows that some attorneys have a reputation for playing hardball. In fact, many of us even seek out attorneys who play hardball. But sometimes “playing hardball” becomes something entirely more disturbing, like a deranged major league pitcher hurling a 90 mile-an-hour fastball at the head of a Little Leaguer. What would you do if you discovered this was the behavior of attorneys representing your university?
This was the question I asked myself in 2008, when my employer, the University of Minnesota, sought $56,000 from a retired St. Paul woman named Mary Weiss. Why? Her mentally ill son had committed suicide in what many observers considered to be a stunningly corrupt, exploitative research study at the university, and Ms. Weiss had the audacity to sue. When her lawsuit was dismissed on statutory grounds, the University of Minnesota apparently decided to…
Like many people, I often like to relax after work with a cool drink and a vice-presidential speech on the stereo. And these days, the album getting the heaviest rotation on my playlist is Spiro T. Agnew Speaks Out. Call me nostalgic; call me a prisoner of the 1970s; but for my money, a better compilation of vice-presidential speeches has never been made.
I discovered the Agnew album at Hymie’s Vintage Records last week. It was in a bin marked “Difficult Listening,” along with other neglected classics such as Jim and Tammy Bakker present the PTL Singers, Deutscher Humor and The Sounds of Welsh Rugby. For those too young to remember Agnew: he was the Maryland ex-governor and Nixon vice-president who was unjustly driven out of the White House in 1973 after a series of financial misunderstandings. Hunter S. Thompson once characterized Agnew as a “flat-out,…
The problem started with a phone call from the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. It was the winter of 2001, and the guy from the Loft was calling about an essay I had written called “How to Be an Academic Failure: An Introduction for Beginners.” That anyone had actually read that essay was a mild shock. I had written it in a moment of self-loathing while on sabbatical in New Zealand, and it had appeared in an obscure, now-dead magazine called The Ruminator Review. The greater shock, however, was what the Loft guy wanted to do with it. He planned to have a professional actor from the Guthrie Theater read my essay about personal failure on stage.
Although a quiet voice in my head was saying “Hang up!” the Loft guy was oddly persuasive. He explained that the event was a kind of literary experiment, and more reassuringly, that my essay would only be one of…
If you start looking into stem-cell tourism, it doesn’t take long before you come across Stem Cell Treatment Monitor, a watchdog blog maintained by Doug Sipp. Subtitled “a skeptic’s guide to stem cell pseudomedicine,” the tone of Stem Cell Treatment Monitor is fierce, partisan, exhaustively detailed, and often very funny. Because Sipp has been tracking stem-cell scams for years, he has developed a rich understanding of the various players involved. He graciously agreed to my request for an interview by email.
CE: How did Stem Cell Treatment Monitor come about?
DS: I had become frustrated with the enormous amount of bad information that is being used to promote scientifically groundless clinical uses of “stem cells” on the Internet. I have to give a lot of credit to other skeptic Web sites, such as Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science, Respectful Insolence, Science-Based…
A more traditional version of hide-and-seek, courtesy of Parent Dish
If I were in charge of distributing NIH grant money, I’d be sending a lot of it to researchers like Erick Turner, a psychiatrist at Oregon Health and Sciences University and a former FDA reviewer. You might remember Turner’s name from a terrific study of antidepressants he led a few years ago that wound up in the New England Journal of Medicine. The question he asked was simple. Does the published medical literature accurately reflect the available data on antidepressants? The methodology Turner and his colleagues used was equally simple (although exhaustively detailed and time-consuming to execute). They compared published studies of antidepressants with the studies listed in FDA drug approval packages. What did they find? Well, if a study was…
Not many people are eager to challenge Celltex these days. The stem-cell company has political clout, plenty of money, and an unpleasant habit of threatening legal action against its critics. Last month, Leigh Turner, my colleague at the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics, wrote a letter to the FDA requesting an investigation. Turner told the FDA he was concerned that Celltex was planning to administer adult stem cells to seriously ill patients without sound evidence that the treatments were safe and effective.
Upon learning of the letter, attorneys for Celltex wrote to the president of the University of Minnesota and demanded a retraction. Noting that Turner’s letter was written on university letterhead, the Celltex attorneys asked what steps the university was taking to “disclaim sponsorship of the Turner letter,” remove it from the Internet, and make sure…
A couple of years ago, the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) launched a project to protect patients. According to Nature, fraudulent stem-cell clinics were offering bogus treatment to desperately ill patients, often at enormous fees, and the ISSCR wanted to help. So the society had set up a Web site instructing patients how to evaluate the claims that many stem cell clinics were making. The Web site, called “A Closer Look at Stem Cell Treatments,” explained that “Just because stem cells came from your body doesn’t mean they are safe,” and “An experimental treatment offered for sale is not the same as a clinical trial.” One section of the Web site, called “Submit a Clinic,” encouraged users to send ISSCR the names of companies offering stem-cell treatment. The ISSCR planned to find out whether the clinics were overseen by a regulatory agency such …
If Texas ever decides to secede from the Union, I’d be mighty tempted to go along. Lightnin’ Hopkins, Molly Ivins, Bob Wills, Kinky Friedman, the 1966 Texas Western basketball team: Without the Lone Star State, American life would look pretty anemic. When Steve Earle declared, “Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that,” I nodded and said, “Amen.”
Most of all, I like Texas crazy. There is no better value for your entertainment dollar. As a native South Carolinian, I claim some expertise in the topic. My brother says: What Mississippi is to the poverty index, South Carolina is to the index of crazy people. (Our unofficial state motto, provided by James L. Petigru in 1860: “South Carolina is too small to be a republic, and too large to be an insane asylum.”) For many years …
Just over a decade ago, a new financial opportunity appeared in the field of bioethics. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies were giving away money. Some companies had started making contributions to bioethics centers; others paid bioethicists to work as consultants and advisers; still others funded endowed chairs and branded awards.
Many bioethicists welcomed the money, arguing that it would support the good work being done by the field; others thought that it might present a conflict of interest, but one that was manageable as long as the source of the money was disclosed. My own reaction was slightly different. To me, the pharmaceutical industry was the serpent in the garden, and its head would need to be crushed.
It was at this point that I began to deliver what some people call my “sinners in the hands of an angry god” sermons. Apparently, I thought that if I…
UPDATE FROM THE EDITORS: The Chronicle received the letter to the editor pasted in below. For further context, readers may wish to consult a later post by Carl Elliott here. They may also wish to see the detailed back and forth between Elliott and Glenn McGee at Reporting on Health. (That back and forth is also linked at the end of Elliott’s 3/1 post.)
_________________________________
To The Editors of The Chronicle of Higher Education:
The editors of The American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB) request a correction to the blog post “Stand Strong, GlaxoSmithKline!” written by Carl Elliott. Mr. Elliott suggests in your blog that The American Journal of Bioethics relocated to a stem cell clinic in Texas. Mr. Eliott says: “just as they’re whining about an…
A number of years ago, a university public-relations official approached me with an invitation. Her office was coordinating a series of columns called “Health Talk and You,” which were published in about 50 newspapers around the state. The columns were short, simple, and straightforward – about 500 words, she said. Would I be interested in taking part? Without giving the question much thought, I said yes.
Then I read her email more carefully. I had initially thought I was being asked to write an article. In fact, however, I was being asked to lend my name to an article which the public relations office would ghostwrite, but which would be published under my byline. A reporter would interview me on the topic of my choice and write an article based on the interview….
SFBC clinical trial site in Miami, from Exposé: America's Investigative Reports.
If the past decade had an emblematic moment for clinical research, it was probably November 12, 2005, the day when Bloomberg Markets published its cover story, “Big Pharma’s Shameful Secret.” In that issue, Bloomberg reporters laid out the story of SFBC International, a contract research organization in Miami that was paying undocumented immigrants to test the safety of new drugs in a seedy motel. The SFBC owners had converted the lobby into a large waiting area with plastic chairs, and they were housing their research subjects six to a room. The medical director of the research site was unlicensed to practice medicine; the Institutional Review Board that approved many of the studies was owned by the wife of the…
Posts on Brainstorm present the views of their authors. They do not represent the position of the editors, nor does posting here imply any endorsement by The Chronicle.
directs the program in history and philosophy of science at
Florida State University. His forthcoming book is Science and
Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science.
is a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the communications program at Columbia University, and a prolific author whose most recent book is a novel, Undying.
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