Emory Has a Mental Problem
October 6, 2008Apparently Emory likes their grant and patent money. A lot.
Well, at least enough to look the other way as a top Psych professor pocketed millions of dollars from drug makers whose products he was testing and reviewing. This surely isn’t just a problem at Emory, as universities across the country are guilty of coveting all that grant and patent money provided by the sciences, which help grow endowments and build massive new campus buildings. But apparently the case of Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff is one of the most blatant as he’s now at the center of a congressional probe.
Hey, you gotta break a few eggs to expand your campus by 50% over the next 10 years, don’t ya?
Oh, Coke University…when did it stop being about the Coke and started being all about writing puff pieces for Cybertronics?
“Hey, you gotta break a few eggs to expand your campus by 50% over the next 10 years, don’t ya? And by “break a few eggs” I mean “look away as your profs put out crap research”.”
Wow, that’s really unfair. If these allegations are true, Dr. Nemeroff failed to report hundreds of thousands of dollars of consulting fees from pharmaceutical companies to the University. This is important b/c he is the principal investigator on an NIH funded study examining a drug from one of those companies. However, it’s unfair to call Dr. Nemeroff’s research crap. If you’re going to do that, please cite a paper written by Dr. Nemeroff and compose an articulate critique of the way his data was collected or the conclusions he made from that data. It is really unfair to say that Emory is allowing it’s faculty to put out “crap research.”
clarification: I meant “report to the university, the consulting fees he received from companies.” The way I originally wrote it, it sounds like Emory receives some of the money from the pharma companies – Emory does not.
Point taken Hoshwa. I’ll tone it down. And I can’t promise to be articulate, but what about this?
From the NY Times article…
“In 2006, he blamed a clerical mix-up for his failing to disclose that he and his co-authors had financial ties to Cyberonics, the maker of a controversial device that they reviewed favorably in a journal he edited.
The Cyberonics paper led to a bitter e-mail exchange between Dr. Nemeroff and Claudia R. Adkison, an associate dean at Emory, according to Congressional records. Dr. Adkison noted that Cyberonics had not only paid Dr. Nemeroff and his co-authors but had also given an unrestricted educational grant to Dr. Nemeroff’s department.”
I agree, it is a serious breach of trust to not disclose consulting relationships when publishing in journals. Similarly, it is a serious breach to under-report your consulting fees by hundreds of thousands of dollars. The role of a University in this is very interesting. As it is know, Universities require their faculty members to report consulting intake in order to insure that it’s under the 10k dollar limit agreed upon when a University receives an NIH grant. Barring a congressional investigation, it is currently very difficult for a University to verifying how much a faculty member receives from a company. Emory wrote a letter to Dr. Nemeroff in 2004, asking him to be completely clear about his financial relationships (PDF of this article is linked to on NYTimes article).
Situations like these are precipitating a change in how consulting fees are disclosed. Very shortly we are going to see pharma companies publicly disclose how much they are paying consultants. This will make it much more difficult (impossible?) for scientists to under-report how much they take in from companies.
The AJC follows up with a summary of 140 letters that were posted by Emory regarding their on-going struggle to rein in Dr. Nemeroff.
I have very little background regarding this sort of thing, but find it really extraordinary that a university has no real oversight of its faculty. Seems to boil down to a lot of he said/she said.
Hopefully the changes Hoshwa mentions above can/will be implemented soon.