Ethics and drug companies at HMS
Harvard Medical School in Ethics Quandary [NYT]
Apparently, Harvard gets one of the worst grades among med schools for mixing drug company money with research with very little regulation:
BOSTON — In a first-year pharmacology class at Harvard Medical School, Matt Zerden grew wary as the professor promoted the benefits of cholesterol drugs and seemed to belittle a student who asked about side effects.
Mr. Zerden later discovered something by searching online that he began sharing with his classmates. The professor was not only a full-time member of the Harvard Medical faculty, but a paid consultant to 10 drug companies, including five makers of cholesterol treatments.
“I felt really violated,” Mr. Zerden, now a fourth-year student, recently recalled. “Here we have 160 open minds trying to learn the basics in a protected space, and the information he was giving wasn’t as pure as I think it should be.”
Mr. Zerden’s minor stir four years ago has lately grown into a full-blown movement by more than 200 Harvard Medical School students and sympathetic faculty, intent on exposing and curtailing the industry influence in their classrooms and laboratories, as well as in Harvard’s 17 affiliated teaching hospitals and institutes.
UPDATE: The NYT is reporting that at US Senator Chuck Grassley has asked Pfizer to provide details of its payments to 149 HMS faculty members (a frankly astonishing number) and for more information about a Pfizer employee taking pictures at a demonstration by med students against corporate influences at HMS.