“We Need Publicly Funded Research Centers”

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Medical research has become too corrupted by bias, according to a post on Ethics Beyond Compliance in reaction to BMJ‘s latest conflict of interest policy update. “We need publicly funded research centers or anonymously funded research centers where researchers can pursue knowledge that may or may not be convenient for corporations. These researchers would be freer to publish negative results of “promising” treatments.”

All Research Is Biased – Might As Well Get Paid For It (Ethics Beyond Compliance, January 2015)

4 COMMENTS

  1. There’s lots of tax payer funded research in the US, given away for free I’ve read, to the corporations. We need to break up the oligopolistic corporations, bring back true competition, and recreate a government “by the people, and for the people.” The entire system is broken, top to bottom, medical research bias is just a symptom of the larger problem.

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    • Great point. This is essentially how computer and internet giants were created – a lot of hard work on basic science funded by tax payers and with a little bit of tweaking to allow commercialization – it all goes to private corporations.

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  2. I think it’s a good idea in its basics — remove the power of pharma to bias researchers. But that doesn’t mean the public should be paying the bill for the research they need done. They should have to foot the bill for research into products they expect to profit from, with the name and producer of the drug completely blinded to the people doing the studies. And while we’re at it, let’s start requiring them to do real studies. No more mini-studies where you take someone withdrawing from one drug and put them up against someone else who’s using the drug for the first time, and then only watch for six weeks, and never study the long-term effects, or — almost as important, and completely neglected — what it’s like to withdraw from that drug and what the dangers are. The whole system needs to be radically reformed.

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