Many researchers maintain close financial ties to the drug companies that stand to gain from the results of their research.
US Congress passed the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, which, starting in 2013, will compel pharmaceutical firms and medical device manufacturers to reveal most of the money that they are putting into the pockets of physicians. Yet as the case study in this article shows, neither scientific institutions nor the scientists themselves have shown a willingness to police conflicts of interest in research.
The effort of pharmaceutical companies to influence science discourse often takes the form of ghostwriting. Once a drugmaker can steer the way that a research article is written, it is able to control, to a large degree, how a scientific result is understood and used by clinicians and researchers.
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. Researchers “think what these companies are after are their brains, but they’re really after the brand,” says Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. “To buy a distinguished, senior academic researcher, the kind of person who speaks at meetings, who writes textbooks, who writes journal articles—that’s worth 100,000 salespeople.”
Researchers cannot stop the influence of drug company money. Hospitals and universities will not do it. The NIH refuses to do it. And as a result, millions of taxpayer dollars fund research whose objectivity is being undermined. Congress, which holds the purse strings, is hopping mad.
Read the full article by Charles Seife: How Drug Company Money Is Undermining Science.
Reference: Scientific American 307, 56 – 63 (2012).
Image: Wang, A. T. et al. Association between industry affiliation and position on cardiovascular risk with “Rosiglitazone”: Cross sectional systematic review. British Medical Journal, Vol.340, No.7750; April 2010.