Academic Researchers’ Conflicts of Interest Go Unreported

[mcablue]

Source: New York Times

November 19, 2009
Academic Researchers’ Conflicts of Interest Go Unreported

By GARDINER HARRIS
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. Federal rules require that researchers report to their universities any outside income that may conflict with government-financed research, much of which comes from the National Institutes of Health. Those rules also require universities to manage those conflicts in ways that protect patients and the integrity of research.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/19/health/policy/19nih.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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I think that disclosure is not enough. Universities should find researchers that do not have a conflict of interest, period. If researcher X owns stocks in the company that sells Viagra, that researcher will likely not admit that the pill does not give men erections, if that were the case (hypothetical example).

[LiberalFighter]

1. They only have to report when those consultations they feel are a conflict?

How about requiring they report all outside income related to their profession?

[moc]

7. My university requires us to report all consulting income over a certain amount

regardless of whether it's a potential conflict of interest or not. (I can't remember what the threshold is b/c I don't really do any consulting myself so it's not an issue for me.)

[Wapsie B]

2. There needs to be complete transparency here.

Nothing less.

[stray cat]

3. I received a mug after placing an order with a company

plus at product show fairs I recieved a number of small candy bars and little packs of smarties or sweettarts - over the years the numerical value is probably as much as $5.00 inlcluding a pen I received, a little post-it pad and a plastic bag to hold catalogs in.

Do these need to be itemized? Also I have no witnesses who were present with me who can vouch for me receiving these gifts. The gifts had no effect on my research as the gifts were from companies I buy from to do my research but there has been no study to prove this absolutely that is external to my own reporting.

[ArbustoBuster]

5. I realize that you're putting up a strawman here, but I can answer you.

I bet you didn't expect anyone to answer, did you?

Yes, you can sometimes be required to report those. I once worked for a company that required me to report the receipt of things like that from vendors we did business with. It was reported en masse, as something like "received bag of random stress-ball desk toys from Vendor X, toys were handed out to the sales team since I didn't want any of them". This was done because one of the higher-ups was absolutely nuts. But, nevertheless, it's possible to require reporting of those kinds of things and to actually do the reporting as required.

If, however, you can't tell the difference between a reasonable demand for complete transparency in fiscal relationships between researchers and industry and your strawman argument about requiring you to report the receipt of an individual pen, then you really need to work on your English skills.

[bobshin]

4. This was truly a Rove-ian analysis brought to you by the NYTimes...

the father paper of the system. The university system was capitalized by the capitalists to ensure that young ones would continue the corporatist system thereby perpetually funding those same capitalists. Free scholarships to the smartest, huge salaries to tenured professors and administrators, research funding and then lifetime jobs.

The system IS a conflict of interest. It is the norm, not the exception.

[jasi2006]

6. Finally given an eye. Start with NIH funding and move on from there. nt