It hasn’t been the best few months for the drug industry, what with the Vitorin controversy and now the fuss about the ghostwriting of medical-journal research articles.
If you missed the last one, the Journal of the American Medical Association recently published an analysis suggesting that pharmaceutical companies were basically renting the prestigious names of scientists to boost research cred. As JAMA’s editor-in-chief, Catherine D. DeAngelis, MD, told NPR’s On the Media on April 18, "People are still being paid to put their name on papers that essentially were already written." This was disputed, of course, but a more worrisome indictment of basic scientific accountability and credibility is hard to imagine.
DeAngelis’s tone was odd, in that radio interview and in others—almost gleeful, as if a widely known but hidden habit had finally been outed, like Uncle Billy’s fondness for dealing meth behind the playground. But if this practice is as widespread as DeAngelis implied, then the whole medical-journal ecosystem has been damaged. Because, as we learned from scandals on Wall Street (and, yes, in the news media), entire industries are tainted when public trust is betrayed. And if you can’t trust the journals, with all their citations and authors, who can you trust?
A few researchers have reacted by refusing any sort of industry money, according to the New York Times. But that won’t work for the wide universe of medical research, which requires big money from every side (government, industry, philanthropy). No, what is needed is more transparency, more light shone into this elevated, obscure world.
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