Ethics and industry-sponsored research

A group of academics puts forward a proposal “to protect the university's most precious commodity: intellectual integrity,” specifically in the context of clinical research on drug effects1; and in an adjoining article a group of medical journal editors, in the same spirit, introduces new requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals.2 In both initiatives, the aim is to manage the threat that the recent surge in industrial sponsorship of applied drug research is seen to pose to the integrity of such research, from study design all the way to its ultimate impact on the knowledge base of scientific medicine. The basis for the concerns is that the industrial sponsor has, fundamentally, a singularly pecuniary motive, with the pursuit of truth at best a means to commercial ends; and that there is published evidence of some industrial sponsors actually having sought to subvert the truth. Implicitly, the idea seems to be that in the absence of exogenous subversive influences, medical academics would exhibit the integrity that is expected of them, and that nothing really is taking away from the integrity expected of medical journal editors.

Let's be frank: threats to the integrity of the knowledge base of scientific medicine are mainly intrinsic to medical academia and medical journals. Ulterior motives are there, and so are their related transgressions, only public attention tends not to be drawn to these, unsurprisingly. The main need is for initiatives to manage the intrinsic threats.