Over the past couple of years, the headlines have been heavily dominated by stories focused on money paid to physicians for their noble work with the pharmaceutical industry and medical device makers. While much of the coverage has only focused on the amounts of money spent, instead of the number of lives and money saved by such collaboration, the “conflict of interest” (COI) movement has been urging academic medical centers, professional organizations, journals, and everyone in between to not accept industry funding for everything from research to continuing medical education (CME).
The COI movement has maintained from the very beginning that working with industry creates a conflict of interest because it creates a bias that risks harming patients. Despite the fact the no reliable evidence exists to show any harm to patients, critics of industry funding have asserted that transparency and management of such conflicts are not enough.
A recent development regarding industry funding of research however, sheds some light on the weaknesses of the arguments maintained by the COI movement. Specifically, the case of a researcher at Harvard University demonstrates that the potential for misconduct, bias and unethical behavior is not just a consequence of industry funding.
The case involves the investigation of Marc Hauser, a Harvard University psychology professor who studies primate behavior and animal cognition. Last week, Michael D. Smith, dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, sent a letter to faculty confirming eight instances of scientific misconduct that Hauser committed.
While the letter did not specify the exact offenses, three papers have received or are receiving modifications. The papers include a 2002 Cognition article (retracted), a 2007 article in Proceedings of the Royal Society B (received an addendum), and a 2007 article in Science.
Consequently, as the Chronicle of Higher Education reported, [T]he investigating committee also found five other studies that either did not result in publications or where the problems were corrected prior to publication. “While different issues were detected for the studies reviewed, overall, the experiments reported were designed and conducted, but there were problems involving data acquisition, data analysis, data retention, and the reporting of research methodologies and results.”
The controversy was also brought to light when a research assistant who worked with Hauser shared emails with the Chronicle of Higher Education, which showed the disagreement with the data. Specifically, Hauser attempted to determine if primates could recognize sound patterns–what some see as a skill for language development. From the Chronicle’s description, the data’s interpretation required determining if a monkey was looking at a stereo speaker as a response to an unusual sound pattern played after a series of similar ones.
In response to these allegations, Hauser acknowledged to the New York Times last week that he had “made some significant mistakes” and that he was “deeply sorry for the problems this case had caused to his students, colleagues and university.”
Ultimately, since federal grants helped fund some of Hauser’s research, as the Dean’s letter describes, federal agencies (PHS Office of Research Integrity, the NSF Office of Inspector General and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts) will continue to investigate. But as the Boston Globe pointed out, Hauser received millions of dollars in federal grants from the government since 2001.
Houser is somewhat famous for his books Wild minds: what animals really think and Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong both books claim some moral equivalency of primates to humans.
It is interesting that major press outlets such as NY Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, all failed to cover this event.
This case demonstrates is that the potential for unethical and biased behavior is found in all sectors of research. While this case may be an exception, rather than the practice, it still demonstrates the fact that money and influence from different sources besides industry can affect the integrity of scientific conduct. With that said, it would be beneficial if government officials realized that the likelihood of problems with funding is equal across all parties (i.e., industry and government), and that the current trend to attack industry funding is unfair, as this case demonstrates.
While congress and NIH are focused on potiential conflicts of interest working with industry at NIH, some unethical researchers are taking advantage of this missfocus and ccleaning out the store, perhaps spending time on real fraud will prove a better use of our limited resources.
You correctly highlight that it is money which corrupts, not any specific source of money. But here is another point that is never mentioned. Most reports of misused funds, biased lectures and falsified data involve academics. That is certainly explained, in part, by the fact that most grant funding goes to academic institutions. But what does this say to those who believe continuing medical education should only be in the hands of academic institutions? And what to say to those in industry who support this myth by denying funding to non-institutional CME providers?