Gadfly or Watchdog?
AIM Column | By Bethany Stotts | July 16, 2008
Dr. Carroll and Dr. Rubin also take credit for Dr. Nemeroff’s decision to leave his job as editor of Neuropsychopharmacology in 2006 following another disclosure scandal.
Some controversies
never die. As Accuracy in Academia recently reported, Dr. Alan Schatzberg and around 30 medical researchers are
now under investigation by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) for financial
conflicts of interest. In Dr. Schatzberg’s case, the
conflicts reach as far back as 1998, when he co-founded the company that
purchased a patent for mifepristone from Stanford
University, his then (and current) employer.
To this day Dr. Schatzberg continues as the principal investigator on
Stanford’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to study the
anti-depressant effects of mifepristone, an abortion drug. Schatzberg
owns $6 million in Corcept Therapeutics stock, according to Senator Grassley.
Surprisingly, my recent article on the subject raised complaints not from Dr. Schatzberg,
but from Dr. Bernard Carroll and UCLA Professor Dr. Robert Rubin—two
doctors who confronted Dr. Schatzberg for his shoddy
science and conflicts-of-interest in 2004.
The two doctors raised
much controversy at a Puerto Rico meeting by presenting a poster which compared
Dr. Schatzberg’s (and other researchers’) grandiose
statements about mifepristone with their financial interest in Corcept
Therapeutics. They also criticized several studies’ conclusions about mifepristone’s effectiveness.
Dr. Carroll, speaking
also for Dr. Rubin, told this
correspondent that Dr. Schatzberg’s
“defamatory allegations,” printed by San Jose Mercury News writer Paul
Jacobs in 2006, are little more than “smears.” The article written by
Jacobs was designed to examine the controversy around Dr. Schatzberg’s
scholarship.
Jacobs’ article did
refer to the two doctors as “self-appointed guardians of scientific rigor in
psychiatric research—gadflies who periodically fire off salvos to journals to
complain about papers that don’t measure up to their standards.” However,
Jacobs also buried Schatzberg’s claims against the
two doctors deep within his story. Jacobs wrote,
“Schatzberg contends that Carroll and Rubin have distorted
what he’s said and harbour professional jealousies
because their own work on cortisol did not result in
new treatments. He also suggests their grievances have nothing to do with his
science.”
Among the listed
“grievances” given were
- being underpaid for consulting fees
- unmarketable (and competing) cortisol research
- getting “passed over for a committee chairmanship.”
Rather than being
unmarketable, Dr. Carroll says his research led to the development of the “dexamethasone suppression test,” which became the testing
standard for the medical community for about ten years. The former head of
psychiatry at Duke University says that, while routinely encouraged to
patent the process, he “believed commercializing the test would work to the
detriment of patients” and therefore “left it in the public domain.”
Dr. Carroll wrote
in an email to this correspondent,
“There is no truth
to the smear that we critiqued Dr. Schatzberg’s work
out of personal resentment. Our original criticism of Dr. Schatzberg,
initiated in 2002, was harsh but collegial and constructive...Its accuracy was
confirmed by independent statistical experts. We had no personal issues with
Dr. Schatzberg at that time.”
He continues, “Any
bad feeling between Dr. Schatzberg and us arose later
through the inappropriate behavior of Dr. Schatzberg
and/or his proxies at Corcept Therapeutics...”
According to Dr.
Carroll, Dr. Schatzberg:
- “derailed the publication” of the Doctors’ critiques,
- turned “scientific disagreements into bogus ethics complaints,”
- threatened legal action against Paul Jacobs for his article,
- and “smeared” their reputations when trying to dissuade the reporter from publishing his 2006 article.
Dr. Carroll has
also served as faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and the University
of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He currently works at
the Pacific Behavioral Research Foundation.
“The pattern here
is of a concerted ad hominem attack by Dr. Schatzberg on his critics in lieu of a substantive response
to our critiques of his weak science,” writes Dr. Carroll. “There is no truth
to the smear that we critiqued Dr. Schatzberg’s work
out of personal resentment.”
However, the two
doctors have a history of conflict with another researcher tied to Corcept Therapeutics.
In the summer of 2003, Dr. Carroll and Dr. Rubin condemned Dr.
Charles Nemeroff for favorably reviewing a number
of depression treatments without first disclosing his financial ties to the
industry, something that Nature Neuroscience did not actually require at
the time.
“One treatment [Dr.
Nemeroff] describes favorably is a patch that
delivers lithium through the skin, a method that he says would improve patients’
ability to tolerate the medicine. He did not disclose that he held the patent
on that patch,” wrote New York Times reporter
Melody Peterson that August. Dr. Nemeroff also
favorably reviewed two other treatments he had financial ties to, including one
owned by Corcept.
Dr. Nemeroff told the NY Times in 2003 that he owned 60,000 shares of Corcept
stock.
Interestingly
enough, Dr. Nemeroff made the same criticism of the
conflict-of-interest dispute as Dr. Schatzberg would
later make. “Dr. Nemeroff contended that Dr. Carroll
was ‘stirring up things’ because of past differences between the two men,”
reports Peterson.
In response to the
controversy, Nature Publishing Group changed its
conflict-of-interest disclosure policy in September 2003, according to the NY Times.
“We are pleased
that we were instrumental in persuading Nature Publishing Group to revise its
policy on disclosure. As you could tell reading between the lines, they brushed
us off for 6 months until the story hit the New York Times,” writes Dr.
Carroll.
Dr. Carroll and Dr.
Rubin also take credit for Dr. Nemeroff’s decision to leave his job as editor of Neuropsychopharmacology in 2006 following another disclosure scandal.
“For your
background, please know that we also challenged Dr. Nemeroff
for another serious instance on nondisclosure in 2006. As a result of that episode, he exited the
editorship of a major journal,” writes Dr. Carroll.
“Nemeroff and his co-authors submitted
disclosure forms with the manuscript, but a clerical error caused the
information to be left off the published paper, Nemeroff
says in an email to Business Week,” reports the business magazine.
Dr. Carroll still
disparages Dr. Nemeroff’s professional ethics to this
day. As he wrote in his own blog this June, “The
Expert Interview by Dr. Nemeroff resembles nothing so
much as Lindsay Wagner promoting the Select Comfort Sleep Number Bed in
television advertisements. Promotional statements are made without scientific
backup.” Dr. Nemeroff chairs the Emory University department of psychiatry.
Bethany Stotts is a Staff Writer for Accuracy in Academia, and can be contacted at
1 Comment | Post a Comment
July 19 at 2:12 pm | #1 | Link
Once again, do those people being given this as an anti-depressant know it is an abortion pill?