Gadfly or Watchdog? by: Bethany Stotts, July 15, 2008 Some controversies never die. As Accuracy in Academia recently reported, Dr. Alan Schatzberg and around thirty 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....