« Novartis, Meet Novartis (Job Cuts or Not?) |
Main
| HIV Therapies: A Thank-You »
December 2, 2010
Ghostwriting On the Larger Scale
Posted by Derek
You've heard, no doubt, of the problem of ghostwritten articles associated with the drug industry. But now there's a report of an entire ghostwritten book. It is (was, since it came out over ten years ago) a guide for family physicians on psychiatric pharmacotherapy, and its authors - scratch that, I mean the names on the cover - are the current chairman of the psychiatry department at Miami and the former chairman at Stanford.
Now, it's not like these two would have been likely to sit down and write the book themselves under normal conditions, either. Had they been so minded, they would surely have farmed out the work to lesser colleagues. Textbook writing like this is not an exalted activity. But from what this article says, it does look as if a medical writing firm working with SmithKline did the actual grunt work, and that it was the company that had final approval over the page proofs.
I have no idea if the content of the book is accurate or not, but that's really only a secondary point. Signing your name as an author to something written by someone else, for their own interests, is unethical. That's the point.
Comments (6)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Why Everyone Loves Us
POST A COMMENT
- RELATED ENTRIES
- › Academia and Industry, Suing Each Other
- › Let's Start Off the Meeting With An Ad, OK?
- › The Academic-Industrial Collaboration in Drug Discovery Panel: Today
- › Glass Structure, Atom by Atom
- › How the Andrulis Paper Got Published
- › AstraZeneca in Waltham
- › Fluorine NMR: Why Not?
- › AstraZeneca Layoffs and Closings
1. dearieme on December 2, 2010 9:25 AM writes...
They are senior academics. What do you expect?
Permalink to Comment2. barry on December 2, 2010 9:35 AM writes...
Gee, Pharma's paid lobbyists write many of the bills that our Senators "draft" and "sponsor". Did you expect that they wouldn't try to sway a million other conversations that can put billions into their accounts?
Permalink to Comment3. Hap on December 2, 2010 11:14 AM writes...
Didn't the first author move to Miami because he couldn't either do math or (more likely) tell the truth about how much money he was getting from pharma companies for advocacy? I would never have expected such a thing from him.
Again, ethics are for peons, I guess.
Permalink to Comment4. MIMD on December 2, 2010 4:01 PM writes...
How contaminated by ghostwriting is the biomedical literature? Can we really know?
For example, has ghostwriting infected even the the "experts" with tainted "knowledge", creating vectors for further spread and mutation of the scientific knowledge base? (link to one of my customary iconoclastic posts.)
I ask that question quite seriously, as the former director of MRL's science research libraries. R&D is strongly dependent on the literature.
Permalink to Comment5. befuddled on December 2, 2010 8:17 PM writes...
It's not always true that textbook writing is farmed out (much less pharmed out) to others. I know for a fact that one popular biochemistry text is written by the authors.
Permalink to Comment6. Paul on December 8, 2010 3:09 PM writes...
nature has an editorial up about the whole issue. it calls for Francis Collins to put a stop to this.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v468/n7325/full/468732a.html
Permalink to Comment