This weekend, there are two major editorials providing an alternate perspective on research and conflict of interest. The theme read together is that research institutions and governments need industry to develop new innovations.
The first editorial in The Washington Post entitled, When Science Is a Siren Song, by David Shaywitz, M.D., an Endocrinologist and former professor at Harvard, focuses around how research is self-correcting. He gives an example of a headline news reports on important research claims such as "skip breakfast for a daughter, eat-up your cereals for a son," which was later disproved with little mention in the press (I am not making it up, and the media, being the lost sheep that they are, eat this stuff-up).
University research is not a pure enterprise; its researchers have feet of clay and are subject to an array of professional biases.
Consequently, our myopic obsession with industry conflicts of interest may have the unintended consequences of distracting us from some of the more important sources of prejudice and concern.
This editorial does a good job in showing that perhaps the most influential bias has nothing to do with commercial support but rather the whole system.
Last night, I had dinner with a researcher in physics, who was describing how his son also a Ph.D. in physics, could not get his papers published due to peer review because the magnetometer they use at his university is the strongest in the world and his results cannot be replicated.
So his son went back and looked up who the peer review committee consists of and wrote his paper with quotes from research papers of the peer reviewers. His research results were the same as the first paper that was rejected but after giving credit to the peer committee members his paper was accepted.
The point here is that science is a political negotiation and not some pure enterprise or holy religion.
The second editorial was in The Wall Street Journal entitled Stem Cells and the Truth About Medical Innovation by Scott Gottleib, M.D. This editorial points out that President Obama’s commitment to research falls short if they adopt new restrictions on sales of pharmaceuticals and devices. That the seed money mostly coming from private risk equity will leave as quick as it has come, if the government puts restrictions on the sales of new products with schemes like competitive effectiveness in which the free or near-free product wins every time if cost is put in the equation.
Making new medicines is the work of a robust private life-science industry. In the case of stem cells, there are more than 150 private companies trying to turn stem cells into new treatments. But almost all of the companies pursuing this sort of chancy science are small biotechnology companies — the kind that rely on private venture capital in order to fund their high-risk and expensive endeavors.
That capital may well start shifting to other enterprises as the Obama administration unveils policies that diminish the incentives to invest in new medical products. There is precedent for the availability of this sort of capital to turn on a proverbial dime. Shortly after President Bill Clinton unveiled his proposal for nationalizing the health-insurance market in the 1990s (with similar limits on access to medical care as in the Obama plan), biotech venture capital fell by more than one-third in a single year, and the value of biotech stocks fell 40%. It took three years for the "Biocentury" stock index to recover. Not surprisingly, many companies went out of business.
Taken together, these editorials ring strong in the need for cooperation between the three legs of the research stool (government, institutions and private investment).