New at Reason

In a feature from reason's October issue Ronald Bailey asks whether you should be worried about so-called pharmaceutical research conflicts of interest.

Comments

joe | September 25, 2007, 9:07am | #

Like my writing teacher always told me, "Write what you know."

:-)

Dan T | September 25, 2007, 9:13am | #

I haven't read the article yet but my guess is that Mr. Balko's answer will be "no".

Let's see...

Dan T | September 25, 2007, 9:16am | #

Er...Mr. Bailey's answer.

I really need to get some coffee before I start my daily trolling.

George Tenet Fangirl | September 25, 2007, 9:29am | #

faculty advancement, obtaining sponsored research funding, winning the acclaim of one’s professional peers, competing for prestigious research prizes, and yes, desiring to alleviate human pain and suffering, all may be more powerful in influencing faculty behavior than the prospect of material enrichment.

So we don't need government regulation because profit isn't the pharmaceutical industry's primary motive? Fascinating!

me3 | September 25, 2007, 9:33am | #

In other loosely health related news, This is a parody, right?
I hope to god it is.

thoreau | September 25, 2007, 10:12am | #

I have to take issue with the discussion of peer reivew:
Peer review has been the traditional means of assuring a study’s validity.

Not quite true. Peer review is simply a first hurdle to cross, a minimal quality check. We look to see whether the work described is thorough and testable. The ultimate check of a study's results is replication by multiple independent investigators. Independence is important because the original investigation may be marred by any number of errors in execution and interpretation, be those errors the result of carelessness, bias, unstated assumptions, peculiar equipment, etc.

Which brings us to this:

By requiring disclosure, journal editors are in effect admitting peer review’s failure. Since their reviewers are not competent to evaluate findings based solely on the data, warning labels need to be slapped onto industry-funded studies.

Wrong. Like I said above, the goal is to have a study reported so it can be examined and then replicated by independent investigators. Reporting of financial interests is about finding out whether various investigators are independent of one another. We wouldn't accept a replication as particularly meaningful if it came from somebody in the same lab as the original investigator, and we might have some questions if the only people replicating the result were all tied to the same interests. It wouldn't necessarily mean that they were deliberately sloppy, but it could be that people with common interests are making the same unwitting errors.

And peer review overlooks honest errors as well as deliberate fraud. “Peer review doesn’t necessarily say that a paper is right,” said Martin Blume, editor-in-chief of the American Physical Society’s nine journals, in a January 2006 interview with Science. “It says it’s worth publishing.”

This part is true. Hence peer review is simply a first step before the report is put out there for the wider community to evaluate.

thoreau | September 25, 2007, 10:15am | #

I really need to get some coffee before I start my daily trolling.

I need to know whether you are an employee of Starbucks before I can conclude that this is an honest, unbiased assessment of your optimal trolling condition. :)

undergroundman | September 25, 2007, 1:41pm | #

Check this out: http://0-biology.plosjournals.org.ilsprod.lib.neu.edu/perlserv/?SESSID=becebecc868c315d7a120cf45b188abe&request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0050193

"In a 2005 commentary, vom Saal and Claude Hughes, a reproductive endocrinologist who had served on the HCRA panel, argued that the report was already obsolete when it came out [16]. By the end of 2004, they had identified 115 published studies on low doses of bisphenol A. They also found a troubling trend. Ninety percent of government studies found significant effects of bisphenol A at doses below the EPA's lowest adverse effect level, but not a single industry study found any effect. Many of the industry studies, they pointed out, either used a rat strain with very low sensitivity to estrogen or misinterpreted failure to find effects with positive controls. Vom Saal and Hughes urged the EPA to conduct a new risk assessment on bisphenol A."

Neu Mejican | September 25, 2007, 2:23pm | #

Dr. T's points are VERY important to keep in mind. Nicely put.

thoreau | September 25, 2007, 2:26pm | #

I wish there was more traffic in this thread, but I recognize that lampooning Ahmadinejad is important.

VM | September 25, 2007, 2:40pm | #

Hi Doktor T!

You're probably correct, but this is one where I'm taking Bronwyn's advice from the "germs in space" (above)... :)

cheerio!

Ron Bailey | September 25, 2007, 4:57pm | #

thoreau: Thanks very for the comments. In fact, I agree with your point on replication about which I said in a different context:

Of course peer review, like democracy and economic institutions such as corporations, is not perfect. The process by which scientific publications are reviewed can doubtless be improved. One proposal is that scientists place pre-prints of their articles online, where their colleagues and competitors can critique them before they are submitted to journals for publication. Others have even argued that peer review doesn't actually improve scientific reports and that it could be eliminated. Peer review is only one, though important, part of the larger system of liberal science that eventually enables us to determine what is true. The gold standard for what is true is not peer review, but experimental replication and the extension of scientific results. The last 200 years of technological progress is powerful evidence that scientific fraud is rare, and the Enlightenment institutions of free speech and mutual criticism that form the basis of liberal science remain strong.

"Validity" means that reviewers find the study "well grounded" not that it represents transcendental truth.

I'm not sure that you disagree that disclosure constitutes a "warning label" which you may well think is a good idea when one is worried about the independence of researchers. Please note that I am in fact in favor of reasonable financial disclosures which I discuss in the article.

Again, thanks for the comments.