Although recent media and government attention to conflicts of interest have centered on the medical world of physicians and the drug industry, a new development regarding COIs has come to the attention of one New York Times reporter in an article titled Corporate Backing for Research? Get Over It.
The story of conflict focuses on Nobel Laureates Al Gore and Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, who won the prize in 2007 on efforts “to protect the planet from the ravages of greedy fossil fuel industries.” Their work however, came under scrutiny “journalists started looking at the money going to companies and nonprofit groups associated with Mr. Gore, and Dr. Pauchauri, the chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Dr. Pauchauri is now contending with accusations of conflict of interest due to his initial warnings of a “very high” likelihood that global warming would cause the Himalayan glaciers to disappear by 2035. In response to such an idea, “the Indian government subsequently published a paper concluding there was no solid evidence of Himalayan glaciers shrinking because of global warming.”
Putting these findings aside, Dr. Pachauri dismissed such research as “voodoo science” beneath the I.P.C.C.’s standards. His dismissal however, was deeply flawed because it relied on a claim by Syed Hasnain, a glaciologist who now works in an Indian research group led by Dr. Pachauri. Essentially, “the I.P.C.C.’s projection was based not on the latest peer-reviewed evidence, but on speculative comments.”
Not only did Dr. Pachauri apologize for this mistake, he also had to acknowledge his “worldwide portfolio of business interests, which included relationships with carbon-trading companies and his research group, the Energy and Resources Institute.”
In his own defense, Dr. Pachauri responded that “he had not profited personally and that he had directed all revenues to his nonprofit institute.” Such an assertion highlighted the common and unfortunate reality of conflict-of-interest accusations that too often “follow the money” even though it leads to nothing but “cheap ad hominem attacks.” As we usually comment about why media feel that doctors being paid for legal work with industry constitute a conflict, NYT posed the question: “why are journalists and ethics boards so quick to assume that money, particularly corporate money, is the first factor to look at when evaluating someone’s work?”
As the article accurately describes, journalists are “lazy,” and would rather try and tie money and corporate connections than “analyze all the other factors that can bias researchers’ work: their background and ideology, their yearnings for publicity and prestige and power, the politics of their profession, the agendas of the public agencies and foundations and grant committees that finance so much scientific work.” Such difficulty in the field of journalism is not monitored by any well followed or nationally recognized code or standards.
Application to Medicine
Some critics of work with industry such as The Journal of the American Medical Association made it a requirement that any published had at least one author with no ties to the industry who would formally vouch for the data. When the author in question works with a totally different company or on a different kind of drug or study, or multiple companies, why should this matter?
The weaknesses of this approach were quickly addressed in BMJ (formerly The British Medical Journal), “which analyzed dozens of large-scale clinical trials in previous decades and reported that industry-sponsored ones met significantly higher standards than the nonindustry ones.”
Another unintended, yet harmful consequence is that these so called ‘conflicts’ are scaring away “the best medical researchers and causing them to shun drug company money altogether — not because they think it leads to bad research, but because they are tired of that fact being highlighted every time they are identified in a news story, as if that were the most important thing to know about their work.”
In fact, NYT even asserted that “too often, corporate conflict-of-interest accusations have been used as smear tactics to silence scientists who ended up being correct. (Go to nytimes.com/tierneylab for examples.)”
Ultimately, as the author suggests, journalists should simply list a link to a page where scientists can list all their public and private donors, “and let readers decide which ones are potentially corrupting.” Moreover, conflicts that should be reported should be relevant, not a financial life story.
We agree with Dr. Pachauri: “follow the science, not the money,” because that’s what will help physicians treat patients and make people healthier.