Science for Sale
(Page 2 of 5)
November/December 1999
Tinker Ready Boston Phoenix (www.bostonphoenix.com)
It's not just a Harvard problem. Increasingly, academic science overlaps with pharmaceutical marketing. Scientists are not required to disclose their corporate ties; individual schools have rules for dealing with the issue, but even if a scientist's work turns out to be compromised, there's no guarantee that doctors or patients will ever know.
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If you think science is neatly split between research in independent university labs and in companies that produce products for profit, you're about 20 years behind. In the past, most campus scientists paid their bills with grants from the federally funded NIH, but a growing percentage of campus labs are now linked to pharmaceutical or biotech companies. Some fund a single study, while others fund an entire lab in exchange for access to its findings. Scientists often sell the rights to their discoveries--from disease-linked genes to potential new drugs--and share the spoils with the university. And, increasingly, university-based scientists are starting their own companies to cash in on their findings.
Some of these links have allowed key discoveries to move off the lab shelf and into the medicine chest: The technology for the CAT scan was discovered at Stanford University and licensed to General Electric. Harvard's artificial skin for burn victims is now made by Cambridge-based Genzyme. But consumer groups and health ethicists worry that without proper safeguards, bias may creep into the work of scientists who stand to profit, or that scientists concerned about patent rights may be less willing to share findings with others who could challenge or build on their work.
Bias happens. The University of California at Irvine shut down a cancer-research lab in 1997 after finding that scientists there had invested in a company that hoped to sell the drugs they were testing--and then had failed to report side effects and used experimental drugs without Food and Drug Administration approval. Researchers at the University of Toronto looked at a series of heart-drug studies in 1998 and found that researchers funded by companies that make the drugs were far more likely than independent scientists to produce studies supporting their use.
Sheldon Krimsky, a Tufts University urban studies professor and research watchdog, is disgusted by a recent $25 million deal struck between the University of California and a Swiss drug company that now has first dibs on Berkeley's plant genetics discoveries. 'An entire department at Berkeley is being bought off by Novartis,' he says.
Krimsky predicts that a private company will probably buy an entire university some day; in the meantime, it's one professor at a time. 'There's no question in any reasonable person's mind that who you get the funding from affects your work,' he says. He sees a pressing need for a system that would require scientists to acknowledge their corporate affiliations whenever they publish a study, speak at a conference, or sit on a review panel.
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