They won’t stop pointing their fingers at Democrats for getting in the way of derailing deregulation. That’s right, they didn’t want to expand predatory lending; exploit loop holes to avoid regulation; or take the money and run. Damn big government.But while we watch Wall Street crumble, Republican deregulation runs deeper throughout the other area’s of our economy, like the all important field of medical research.
The NY Times:
For a break from the news of the financial meltdown, The Times on Saturday offered a page one story about Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff, a prominent psychiatrist at Emory University, who violated federal research rules regarding conflicts of interest and made millions of dollars consulting for the pharmaceutical industry. Nemeroff … earned $2.8 million in fees from 2000 to 2007, and had at one point consulted for 21 drug and device companies simultaneously … yet another iteration of the ever-unfolding saga of greed and how the deregulation of absolutely everything has brought our country to this painful season of reckoning … the failure of our government to step in to protect citizens.
And these relationships have led to a dangerous crisis of confidence in the basic integrity and validity of America’s medical research. That changed in the early 1980s with the passage of legislation that allowed universities to patent their publicly funded research results and then grant exclusive licenses to pharmaceutical companies. The public-private wall came down. The universities received royalties on the drugs, and the royalties were split between the researchers and the departments. Start-up companies were spun off and sold. University researchers became, essentially, partners to industry.
The change wasn’t just structural, however. There was a cultural shift, a kind of boundary melt.
“Greed became respectable,” Dr. Marcia Angell, a professor of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School and the former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, recalled. “There used to be a sort of tension between doing well and doing good for medical researchers. If they wanted to make a lot of money in a high-risk sort of job they could work for industry. If they wanted to do important, exciting research they stayed in academia and they had a comfortable life but not great wealth.
“Before 1980, those who went into industry were held in some disdain. With Reagan, all this changed. There was a strong feeling that the world divided into winners and losers. In medical research this just has had enormous implications.”
For a break from the news of the financial meltdown, The Times on Saturday offered a page one story about Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff, a prominent psychiatrist at Emory University, who violated federal research rules regarding conflicts of interest and made millions of dollars consulting for the pharmaceutical industry. Nemeroff … earned $2.8 million in fees from 2000 to 2007, and had at one point consulted for 21 drug and device companies simultaneously … yet another iteration of the ever-unfolding saga of greed and how the deregulation of absolutely everything has brought our country to this painful season of reckoning … the failure of our government to step in to protect citizens.
And these relationships have led to a dangerous crisis of confidence in the basic integrity and validity of America’s medical research. That changed in the early 1980s with the passage of legislation that allowed universities to patent their publicly funded research results and then grant exclusive licenses to pharmaceutical companies. The public-private wall came down. The universities received royalties on the drugs, and the royalties were split between the researchers and the departments. Start-up companies were spun off and sold. University researchers became, essentially, partners to industry.
The change wasn’t just structural, however. There was a cultural shift, a kind of boundary melt.
“Greed became respectable,” Dr. Marcia Angell, a professor of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School and the former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, recalled. “There used to be a sort of tension between doing well and doing good for medical researchers. If they wanted to make a lot of money in a high-risk sort of job they could work for industry. If they wanted to do important, exciting research they stayed in academia and they had a comfortable life but not great wealth.
“Before 1980, those who went into industry were held in some disdain. With Reagan, all this changed. There was a strong feeling that the world divided into winners and losers. In medical research this just has had enormous implications.”
It’s had enormous implications for our world generally. On Wall Street, change had to come via catastrophe. Let’s hope it won’t take a disaster to bring sense back to medicine.
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