http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/1147
How industry is undermining academia, Jennifer Washburn, author of
"University, Inc.", 2005.01.07, American Prospect, Open Society Institute:
Murray aspartame research reviews 2005.01.18

http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=8994

Studied Interest

From our February 2005 issue: How industry is undermining academia. Adapted
from the book University, Inc. By Jennifer Washburn
Web Exclusive: 01.07.05 Print Friendly | Email Article

M. Michael Wolfe, a gastroenterologist at Boston University, admits he was
duped by the Pharmacia Corporation, the manufacturer of the blockbuster
arthritis drug Celebrex prior to its purchase by Pfizer in 2003. In the
summer of 2000, The Journal of the American Medical Association asked Wolfe
to write a review of a study showing that Celebrex was associated with lower
rates of stomach and intestinal ulcers and other complications than two
older arthritis medications, diclofenac and ibuprofen. Wolfe found the
study, tracking 8,000 patients over a six-month period, persuasive, and
penned a favorable review, which helped to drive up Celebrex sales.

But early the next year, while serving on the Food and Drug Administration's
(FDA) arthritis advisory committee, Wolfe had occasion to review the same
drug trial again, and was flabbergasted by what he saw. Pharmacia's study
had run for one year, not six months, as the company had originally led both
Wolfe and the Journal to believe. When the complete data was considered,
most of Celebrex's advantages disappeared because the ulcer complications
that occurred during the second half of the study were disproportionately
found in patients taking Celebrex.

"I am furious," Wolfe told The Washington Post in 2001. "I looked like a
fool. But ... all I had available to me was the data presented in the
article." Remarkably, none of the Journal study's 16 authors, including
eight university professors, had spoken out publicly about this egregious
suppression of negative data. All the authors were either employees of
Pharmacia or paid consultants of the company.

Celebrex, an anti-inflammatory drug similar to Vioxx, is once again in the
news due to concerns that it may be associated with the same cardiovascular
risks that caused Vioxx to get yanked from the market. In recent months,
we've heard a great deal about conflicts of interest at both the FDA, the
agency that approves drugs for public safety, and the National Institutes of
Health, where publicly funded scientists moonlight as consultants for the
very companies that manufactured the drugs they are testing. Still largely
ignored, however, is the role played by the once-autonomous ivory tower and
the university scientists who, either knowingly or unknowingly, facilitate
the pharmaceutical industry's manipulation of drug testing by lending it an
aura of objectivity.

With the possible exception of business schools, the nation's medical
schools have been more infiltrated by industry than any other sector of the
university. Pharmaceutical companies sponsor daily lunches for medical
students at which they market their latest drugs; they ply professors with
fancy dinners, gifts, luxurious trips, and free prescriptions designed to
influence medical decisions and prescribing habits. The drug industry also
spends millions of dollars financing clinical drug research at the academy,
but increasingly this money comes with many more strings attached. After
conducting a thorough review of the medical literature for The New England
Journal of Medicine in 2000, Thomas Bodenheimer, an internist at the
University of California, San Francisco, concluded that academic
investigators were rapidly ceding to industry control over nearly every
stage of the clinical research process.

But all the blame for the eroding objectivity of university researchers does
not rest with industry. Universities themselves are complicit: They are so
financially invested in their professors' research through patents, equity,
and other financial holdings that their disinterested pursuit of knowledge
has been gravely compromised. For instance, when the Harvard Center for Risk
Analysis' longtime director, Professor John D. Graham, was nominated by
President George W. Bush to become the government's "regulatory czar" at the
Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (part of the Office of
Management and Budget), it helped to expose just how extensive Harvard's
financial conflicts really were.

Congressional hearings revealed that Graham's center solicited tobacco money
and worked with the tobacco industry to disparage the risks of secondhand
smoke. (Harvey Fineberg, a dean at the Harvard School of Public Health,
demanded that one check from Philip Morris be returned. In response, Graham
wrote to the company asking if it might send the $25,000 back to the Harvard
center via the Philip Morris subsidiary Kraft Foods instead.) Graham's
center also argued that cell-phone use by drivers should not be restricted,
even though its own research, which was funded by AT&T Wireless
Communications, showed that such use could lead to a thousand additional
highway deaths a year. As a member of the Environmental Protection Agency's
scientific advisory board subcommittee on dioxin, a known human carcinogen,
Graham argued that reducing dioxin levels might "do more harm . than good."

His Harvard center, meanwhile, was heavily funded by dioxin producers.
Worse yet, the universities' loyalties are now so conflicted that schools
are increasingly willing to cave in to narrow commercial demands rather than
defend their own professors' academic freedom or the public interest. When
researchers at the University of Utah discovered an important human gene
responsible for hereditary breast cancer, for example, they didn't make it
freely available to other scientists, even though we -- the U.S.
taxpayers -- paid $4.6 million to finance the research. The university raced
to patent it, then granted the monopoly rights to Myriad Genetics Inc., a
startup company founded by a University of Utah professor, which proceeded
to hoard the gene and prevent other academic scientists from using it.

Professors, too, are increasingly driven by the bottom line. More and more,
they not only accept industry grants to support their research but also hold
stock in or have other financial ties to the companies funding them. Many
experts fear this skewing of professors' research toward short-term
commercial goals will impede long-term scientific and technological
innovation. Financial entanglements between researchers and corporations
have grown so common that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has
investigated numerous academic researchers suspected of engaging in insider
trading.

In a case filed in Pennsylvania, the SEC charged Dale J. Lange, a Columbia
University neurologist, with pocketing $26,000 in profits after Lange bought
stock in a company that was about to release promising new findings
concerning a drug to treat Lou Gehrig's disease. Lange had good reason to
expect the stock to soar because he had conducted the confidential clinical
trials himself. In 2000, an investigation by USA Today found that more than
half the experts hired to advise the U.S. government on the safety and
effectiveness of drugs -- a large number of whom are academics -- now have
financial links to companies that will be affected by their conclusions.

So how does this growing web of academic-industry ties affect research
outcomes? A vast body of work suggests that industry-funded research is far
from impartial. In 1996, Stanford researcher Mildred Cho co-authored a study
in the Annals of Internal Medicine that found that 98 percent of papers
based on industry-sponsored research reflected favorably on the drugs being
examined, compared with 79 percent of papers based on research not funded by
industry.

An analysis published in The Journal of the American Medical Association in
1999 found that studies of cancer drugs funded by the pharmaceutical
industry were nearly eight times less likely to reach unfavorable
conclusions than similar studies funded by nonprofit organizations. More
recently, a systematic review of 1,140 clinical trial studies, published by
researchers at Yale in 2003, concluded that, from cancer to arthritis to
cholesterol, the evidence is overwhelming that when research is
industry-sponsored, it is "significantly more likely to reach conclusions
that [are] favorable to the sponsor" than non-industry-funded research.

In the area of health and drug research, of course, the results of such
manipulation can be deadly. Running down the list of drugs recently pulled
from the market or subject to increased health warnings -- Rezulin, the
diabetes drug; Redux (or fen-phen), the diet drug; Retin-A, the anti-wrinkle
cream; Neurontin, the epilepsy drug; Paxil, Zoloft, and the many other
antidepressants now deemed ineffective for children -- one finds that a
remarkable number of prominent university professors with close financial
ties to the manufacturers played a central role in lobbying for these drugs
to be approved, recommending them to other doctors, and, in many cases,
urging that they remain on the market long after the problems or lack of
effectiveness became known. Not infrequently, the university scientists who
shill for the drug companies most aggressively are also the biggest-name
professors in their fields.

In some respects, the whole debate reflects how far the academic world
remains from dealing seriously with the issue; disclosure of potential
conflicts of interest is, after all, a far cry from eliminating them
outright, as many professions not only recommend but also require. In the
legal profession, for example, attorneys are prohibited from taking on cases
in which they have a financial interest or other explicit conflicts that
might be seen to compromise their professional integrity. The same is true
of judges. But when it comes to academia, neither the medical community nor
the government (whether through Congress or the regulatory agencies) has
taken up the task, instead proceeding under the assumption that universities
can be trusted to manage these commercial interactions themselves. It's a
nice idea. But are academic institutions really capable of performing this
function? There is good reason to be skeptical: Far from being independent
watchdogs capable of dispassionate inquiry, universities are increasingly
joined at the hip to the very market forces the public has entrusted them to
check, creating problems that extend far beyond the research lab.

Jennifer Washburn is a fellow at the Open Society Institute. Adapted from
the book University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education.
Copyright 2005. Reprinted by arrangement with Basic Books, a member of the
Perseus Books Group. All rights reserved. A longer excerpt appears in the
February 2005 print edition of The American Prospect.

Copyright © 2005 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Jennifer
Washburn, "Studied Interest", The American Prospect Online, Jan 7, 2005.
This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation
of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct
questions about permissions to permissions@....
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Open Society Institute, 400 West 59th Street, ew York, NY 10019, USA
Tel. 1-212-548-0600

http://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=Bio&contactID=65 [ photo ]
washburn@...


Gastroenterol Clin North Am. 2003 Sep;32(3 Suppl):S37-46.
Managing gastroesophageal reflux disease: from pharmacology to the clinical
arena.
Wolfe MM.
Section of Gastroenterology, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston
Medical Center, Boston, MA, USA. Michael.Wolfe@...
PMID: 14556434


Dis Manag. 2003 Summer;6(2):63-71.
Interventions to improve chronic illness care: evaluating their
effectiveness.
Bodenheimer T.
Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of California at San
Francisco, Building 80-83, San Francisco General Hospital, 1001 Potrero
Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA. Tbodenheimer@...
PMID: 14577900

http://scbe.stanford.edu/people/resumes/cho.html


Mildred K. Cho, Ph.D. phone: (650) 725-7993 micho@...
Mildred Cho is Senior Research Scholar and Associate Director at the
Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics. She received her B.S. in
Biology in 1984 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her Ph.D.
in 1992 from the Stanford University Department of Pharmacology. Her
post-doctoral training was in Health Policy as a Pew Fellow at the Institute
for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco and
at the Palo Alto VA Center for Health Care Evaluation. Before coming to
Stanford, Dr. Cho was Assistant Professor of Bioethics in the Center for
Bioethics and the Department of Molecular and Cellular Engineering at the
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. She is a member of national
advisory boards for the National Human Genome Research Institute and for the
American Association for the Advancement of Science Public Policy
Directorate.

Professional Interests and Activities
Dr. Cho's major areas of interest are the ethical and social impacts of
genetic research, genetic testing and gene therapy, and how conflicts of
interest affect the conduct of academic biomedical research. Her current
research projects include: a study of factors affecting patients' and
practitioners' use of genetic tests for hereditary breast and ovarian
cancer, a study of the roles of heredity and race or ethnicity in the
stigmatization of genetic conditions, ethical issues in pharmacogenetics and
bioinformatics, a study of the effect of gene patenting on the delivery of
clinical genetics services, and an analysis of university policies on
academic-industry ties.
Center Research Programs
Selected Publications/Talks
Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics
701 Welch Road, Building A, Suite 1117

Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics
701 Welch Road, Building A, Suite 1105, Palo Alto, California 94304, U.S.A.
Stanford Mail Code 5748
Telephone (650) 723-5760 Facsimile (650) 725-6131
Main Email SCBE-info@...
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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/1143
methanol (formaldehyde, formic acid) disposition: Bouchard M et al, full
plain text, 2001: substantial sources are degradation of fruit pectins,
liquors, aspartame, smoke: Murray 2005.01.18 rmforall

Rich Murray, MA Room For All rmforall@...
1943 Otowi Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505 USA 505-501-2298
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/messages
139 members, 1,147 posts in a public searchable archive

The moderated newsgroup, bionet.toxicology , has accepted 26 of my long
reviews since March 24:

Dr. Charles "Chuck" A. Miller III rellim@...
Associate Professor of Environmental Health Sciences
374 Johnston Building, SL29
Tulane Univ. School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine
1430 Tulane Avenue New Orleans, LA 70112 (504)585-6942
Bionet.toxicology news group http://www.bio.net/hypermail/toxicol/current

[ NutraSweet, Equal, Canderel, Benevia, E951 ]

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/927
Donald Rumsfeld, 1977 head of Searle Corp., got aspartame FDA approval:
Turner: Murray 2002.12.23 rmforall

A very detailed, highly credible account of the dubious approval process for
aspartame in July, 1981 is part of the just released two-hour documentary
"Sweet Misery, A Poisoned World: An Industry Case Study of a Food Supply
In Crisis" by Cori Brackett: cori@...
http://www.soundandfuryproductions.com/ 520-624-9710
2301 East Broadway, Suite 111 Tucson, AZ 85719

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartame/messages
Aspartame Victims Support Group Edward Bryant Holman, Chief Moderator
816 members, 17,947 posts in a public, searchable archive
http://www.presidiotex.com/aspartame/ bryanth@...

http://www.HolisticMed.com/aspartame mgold@...
Aspartame Toxicity Information Center Mark D. Gold also Co-Moderator
12 East Side Drive #2-18 Concord, NH 03301 603-225-2110
http://www.holisticmed.com/aspartame/abuse/methanol.html
"Scientific Abuse in Aspartame Research"

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/957
safety of aspartame Part 1/2 12.4.2: EC HCPD-G SCF:
Murray 2003.01.12 rmforall EU Scientific Committee on Food, a whitewash

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/1045
http://www.holisticmed.com/aspartame/scf2002-response.htm
Mark Gold exhaustively critiques European Commission Scientific
Committee on Food re aspartame ( 2002.12.04 ): 59 pages, 230 references

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aspartameNM/message/1131
genotoxicity of aspartame in human lymphocytes 2004.07.29 full plain text,
Rencuzogullari E et al, Cukurova University, Adana, Turkey 2004 Aug: Murray
2004.11.06 rmforall
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