You just can't help yourself, can you? You don't have any idea what constitutes a conflict of interest or how research is conducted in this country. But here you are acting like you do.
Nobody works on pharma grants unless they work for big pharma—immediate conflict of interest.
Pharmaceutical companies support all kinds of primary research. They know where the good work is being done and they try and stay as close to it as possible for obvious reasons. Commercializing that research and making products that help people is quite the challenge. Without the expertise of the drug industry, none of that primary research would result in products that save and improve lives.
The pharmaceutical companies are thoroughly discredited for numerous problems over the years from buying vacations for doctors to paying doctors to shill for their products at medical conferences
Pharmaceutical companies promote their products to the people who prescribe them? Say it isn't so. Oh, the humanity! Oh, the horror! ROFL!!!
I’m not saying it’s altogether fair... but I am saying if Merck can’t underwrite a conference on psychopharmacology that doesn’t even include paid presenters, how in the hell can they get off buying the president of a research hospital?
Merck bought the president of Anderson Medical Center? And for proof you have......? Yeah, just as I thought, you're talking out of the wrong end. Again, you are woefully ignorant about how research is conducted or how the drug industry commercializes products and then promotes them. That makes you uniquely unqualified to be offering an opinion on the subject. Over the past couple of decades, nine out of every ten NME's brought to market have been discovered in the USA.Yeah, all that conflict of interest is killing the industry. We must be doing something right - your feelings to the contrary notwithstanding. Sorry.
Well, I’m going through the refresher course to get my human subjects research certificate renewed.
There IS controversy and debate about the influence of big Pharma’s profit motive on medicine. And I think a Merck bought president of MD Anderson would be a problem. However, I don’t KNOW that President Pinho is bought and paid for. I probably was talking out the wrong end on that one. Moreover, I think a great deal of the rabid anti-pharma sentiment is misplaced - they’re doing like they’ve done with energy - someone does something stupid, or careless, or illegal and instead of focusing on the offender, and looking for others, they try to shut down the whole industry.
Anyway, no hard feelings I hope.