Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14439

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Editorial .
More than one bad apple
Nature 2008 Oct 16; 455:(7215):835
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v455/n7215/full/455835a.html

Abstract:

A congressional investigation alleges that some researchers have failed to report all the drug-company money that they have received – and that universities may have been too slow to police them.

The case of Charles Nemeroff, who as chair of the psychiatry department at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, allegedly underreported his income from drug companies, offers some stark revelations. Not only does it seem that Nemeroff was able to skirt around rules for reporting income, but Emory’s officials appeared unable to rein him in.

A string of internal Emory documents and e-mails made public last week after a hearing of the US Senate Committee on Finance, chaired by Senator Charles Grassley (Republican, Iowa), allege a web of consulting, lecturing and advisory-board relationships that Nemeroff maintained with 16 pharmaceutical companies. By obtaining figures from each of the companies and comparing them with Nemeroff ’s financial disclosure forms provided by Emory, the committee’s investigators alleged that, in breach of university rules, he failed to report at least $1.2 million in income that these relationships earned him between 2000 and 2006…

It is tempting to dismiss this case as a ‘one-bad-apple’ situation. But Nemeroff is the seventh academic psychiatrist this year that Grassley has exposed as allegedly underreporting drug-company income…

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