An Aspiring Scientist's Open Letter of Resignation

[Gaby]

Reminds of the first time I was involved in a multi-center study, all very professional, academic, scientific rigor and what not. I was not even acquainted with this forum and psychopthy and its role in the corruption of science. It all stinks to high heaven. This news item sums it up the medical research:

http://www.sott.net/article/267464-Drug-giants-fined-11bn-for-criminal-wrongdoing

Drug giants fined $11bn for criminal wrongdoing

The global pharmaceutical industry has racked up fines of more than $11bnin the past three years for criminal wrongdoing, including withholding safety data and promoting drugs for use beyond their licensed conditions.

In all, 26 companies, including eight of the 10 top players in the global industry, have been found to be acting dishonestly. The scale of the wrongdoing, revealed for the first time, has undermined public and professional trust in the industry and is holding back clinical progress, according to two papers published in today's New England Journal of Medicine. Leading lawyers have warned that the multibillion-dollar fines are not enough to change the industry's behaviour.

The 26 firms are under "corporate integrity agreements", which are imposed in the US when healthcare wrongdoing is detected, and place the companies on notice for good behaviour for up to five years.

The largest fine of $3bn, imposed on the UK-based company GlaxoSmith-Kline in July after it admitted three counts of criminal behaviour in the US courts, was the largest ever. But GSK is not alone - nine other companies have had fines imposed, ranging from $420m on Novartis to $2.3bn on Pfizer since 2009, totalling over $11bn.

Kevin Outterson, a lawyer at Boston University, says that despite the eye watering size of the fines they amount to a small proportion of the companies' total revenues and may be regarded as a "cost of doing business". The $3bn fine on GSK represents 10.8 per cent of its revenue while the $1.5bn fine imposed on Abbott Laboratories, for promoting a drug (Depakote) with inadequate evidence of its effectiveness, amounted to 12 per cent.

Mr Outterson said: "Companies might well view such fines as a quite small percentage of their global revenue. If so, little has been done to change the system. The government merely recoups a portion of the financial fruit of firms' past misdeeds."

He argues that penalties should be imposed on executives rather than the company as whole. He cites a Boston whistleblower attorney, Robert Thomas who observed that GSK had committed a $1bn crime and "no individual has been held responsible".

Following GSK's admission that it had withheld safety data about its best-selling diabetes drug Avandia, the company pledged to make more clinical trial information available. But the pledge has "disturbing exceptions", according to Mr Outterson, and in any case is made under the corporate integrity agreement, which expires in five years.

Trust in the industry among doctors has fallen so low that they dismiss clinical trials funded by it, even when the trials have been conducted with scientific rigour, according to a second paper in the journal by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston. This could have serious implications because most medical research is funded by the drug industry and "if physicians are reluctant to trust all such research, it could hinder the translation of ... research into practice," said Aaron Kesselheim, who led the study.

So exc, everybody is starting to be more suspicious. The problem is, that even when there is good quality research, now we don't know if we are going to hear about it or if it has any chance of coming through:

_http://www.nature.com/news/

Live updates: US government shutdown

The US government shut down on 1 October after Congress failed to agree on a new budget. Most government scientists have been ordered to stay away from work and from scientific conferences. Academic scientists are cut off from key databases and grant monies. The US Antarctic Program has suspended its field season and NASA missions are delayed. NSF-funded telescopes and Department of Energy labs plan to close.

LATEST: Lab life during the shutdown at the National Institutes of Health.

From the National Institutes of Health (NIH) alone:

_http://www.sott.net/article/267234-NIH-shutdown-effects-multiply

[...]

Access denied

Others are frustrated because the NIH has warned that it will not be able to sustain online resources that are used routinely by scientists around the world. Those tools include the database PubMed, which indexes 22 million journal articles; PubMed Central, a repository for more than 2.8 million free articles; software tools such as BLAST, the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, which is used widely in genetic research; and databases such as the genetic-sequence repository GenBank.

NIH cannot guarantee access to key databases and websites during the US government shutdown.
The shutdown means that researchers may attempt to deposit articles to PubMed Central or data to GenBank - steps that are often required as a condition of grants or publications - but these submissions will not be formally accepted. "Those of us doing molecular work are at a standstill," says Robinson Fulweiler, an ecologist and biogeochemist at Boston University in Massachusetts, who does not receive NIH funding but relies on NIH-funded databases for her work.

Some scientific meetings are being rescheduled or cancelled in reaction to the news that government scientists will not be able to attend. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, for instance, postponed a meeting that it had planned for 7 October on how microbiome research should inform federal planning of major infrastructure projects such as hospitals, after many federal speakers and participants were barred from attending.

Microbial-genomics researcher Jonathan Eisen at the University of California, Davis, had to cancel his plans to travel and speak at the meeting, which was to be held in Washington DC. But while the shutdown is affecting science, he says, "I don't think science is unique; the shutdown is bad for everyone."

Fulweiler is angry. She says that some of her research will be irretrievably hampered. That includes a study of oyster aquaculture in Rhode Island that she is working on with researchers from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Fulweiler was scheduled to take the first measurements of the season at the site this week, but these plans are now delayed indefinitely because her EPA colleagues are not allowed to come to work.

"We want to do our job and we can't, because the government isn't doing its job," says Fulweiler.

Pretty bad and very convenient for the Control System.

So bad science sponsored by corporations and Big Pharma are likely to survive. Good research is likely to suffer, not to mention that we might not be able to hear from it in the first place if pubmed or other databases don't update their information.