In The New York Times, Duff Wilson reports on the efforts of more than 200 Harvard Medical School students and faculty to expose and curtail relationships between certain faculty members and lecturers and pharmaceutical companies.
The students argue, for example, that Harvard should be embarrassed by the F grade it recently received from the American Medical Student Association, a national group that rates how well medical schools monitor and control drug industry money.
Harvard Medical School’s peers received much higher grades, ranging from the A for the University of Pennsylvania, to B’s received by Stanford, Columbia and New York University, to the C for Yale.
Students have already forced professors to disclose industry ties in class, and Harvard Medical’s dean has announced a 19-member committee – with three student representatives – aimed at re-evaluating the school’s conflict-of-interest policies.
Harvard has fallen behind, some faculty and administrators say, because its teaching hospitals are not owned by the university, complicating reform; because the dean is fairly new and his predecessor was such an industry booster that he served on a pharmaceutical company board; and because a crackdown, simply put, could cost it money or faculty.
Related
Site tracks schools’ conflict-of-interest policies
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