Presidential address: Research ownership, communication of results, and threats to objectivity in client-driven research
✍ Scribed by Charles E. Metcalf
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 122 KB
- Volume
- 17
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0276-8739
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
from a pharmaceutical company to test a brand-name thyroid drug (produced by the company) against three less expensive (one brand-name, two generic) alternatives. The professor signed a contract that specified the research protocol and experimental design in detail. The contract also included a confidentiality provision prohibiting publication of the results without client permission.
The results submitted in 1990 turned out to be "unfavorable" to the company: The study concluded that the four drug preparations were "bioequivalent," despite the much higher cost of the company's formulation. The company responded by: (1) waging a 4-year campaign to discredit the study; (2) denying the professor permission to publish by invoking the confidentiality clause in the contract, forcing the professor to withdraw a Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) article 12 days before its scheduled publication in 1995; and (3) publishing the company's interpretation of the data, without acknowledgment of the original study, in a journal supported in part by the company [see Rennie, 1997].
"Justice" finally prevailed, some 7 years after the study's completion, under the pressure of adverse publicity [see Altman, 1997a, 1997b; Sternberg, 1997]. The original article was recently published in JAMA after the company withdrew its objections. The study utilized a randomized, four-way crossover trial with a completed sample size of 22; the published article had seven authors [see Dong et al., 1997].
Although this saga involves an extreme compounding of several events in a single study funded by the pharmaceutical industry, elements of the story are common to the broader domain of policy research. Individuals and institutions conducting client-funded research encounter contractual restrictions on their right to disseminate results, and they may face pressure-often subtle-to alter the interpretation of their findings or the content of their reports. These restrictions and pressures may be present whether the client is a private firm, government agency, or foundation.