Roy poses has a thoughtful piece about the recurrent ramblings of Dr Scott Gottlieb (medical doctor, apologist in chief for creative commercial pharmaceutical science, and columnist for the Wall Street Journal).
Gottlieb just wrote an opinion piece in the WSJ in which he expressed the opinion that government funded researchers must somehow be forced to provide their raw data to the pharmaceutical industry ---- just so industry can check the honesty of what those researchers are doing.
All I can say is that sounds very interesting Dr Gottlieb. I fully agree - of course science should be transparent. Science that cannot be scrutinized is not science at all.
Perhaps Gottlieb will join us in a campaign to get GSK to place "their" Seroxat data in the public domain (that's raw data we're talking about), to get P&G to do the same with their Actonel data from Sheffield, and to get Lilly to put out all the raw numbers from the Zyprexa studies.
The list is endless.
That would be fun Dr Gottlieb. Doctors might actually be able to make prescribing decisions based on complete and non-combobulated numbers instead of the far more interesting company version of events.
The free market may be able to operate at last, and industry might be able to start selling their products under the banner of science. I'll send along a copy of the petition for you to sign immediately Dr Gottlieb. I see a new world dawning.
And by the way Gottlieb is resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He was made Deputy Commissioner of the FDA (2005 to 2007) despite being described in the press as "a Wall Street insider, promoting hot biotech stocks to investors", and having "consulted for, and written positively about, a major matchmaking firm that links doctors with Wall Street investors, the Gerson Lehrman Group", an advisor to Novartis and with host of other conflicts of interest, none of which are declared. He is even a medical doctor, or did I forget to mention that.
For another excellent commentary see http://www.scienceblogs.com/denialism/ by Mark Hoofnagle.
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3 comments:
Hilarious. Dr Gottlieb's position is presumably founded upon the "fact" that commercial interests have the greatest expertise in these matters. I can's see why else they should be appointed as the Infallible Arbiter of Truth.
It would be interesting to understand why he believes that, I think.
Matt
Well said Aubrey
Science that cannot be scrutinized is not science at all- well said. This guy is a joke. I can't believe things like this are allowed to occur and never brought up.
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