Biotech: Journal Asks Contributors About
Financial Interests
Starting October 1, the renowned journal Nature will join the ranks of other science publications that are asking scientists who submit papers to disclose any financial interests in their work.
To get accepted for publication, scientists will be required to say whether or not they have a financial interest or no response.
The answer will appear in print with the study.
Charles Jennings, executive director for the weekly Nature and its seven monthly research journals, said the publication had pondered the disclosure issue for some time.
“There’s been a rising tide of concern among scientists and the general public about the effects of financial interests in basic research,” Jennings said. “There is at least some evidence that a financial interest can have a biasing effect.”
That is with good reason, said Michael Kalichman, a UCSD professor of pathology and director of the university’s Research Ethics Program.
Kalichman cited one study that suggests that scientists with industry ties such as partial ownership of a company, consulting, grant support or patent holders may be less objective in their work than those without industry support.
Study Showed Bias
The three-year old study by the New England Journal of Medicine culled all papers published within two years that discussed the safety of a particular drug.
Reviewers then sorted them according to criticalness, neutrality and favorableness.
The findings showed that critical papers had the least industry support, or 43 percent, versus the majority of neutral papers, or 63 percent.
All papers in favor of the drug were written by authors with ties in industry.
Some people may find this disturbing, but Kalichman was quick to defend scientists.
“It doesn’t mean that those authors fudged their results,” he said. “What is quite likely to happen is unintentional bias of how work is done.”
Hank Greely, chairman of the steering committee at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, also agreed bias is likely to occur unconsciously rather than intentionally.
“I don’t know anybody that can guarantee their analysis isn’t affected by their desires,” Greely said. “Scientists always want to find an interesting result that could lead to tenure, grant money or the Nobel Prize ”
Jennings said while it’s too early to say how scientists will respond to the new policy, the majority seems to support it.
Aids Readers’ Decisions
To publish the new information offers scientific readers a way to judge papers even more critically and follow up experiments to test the hypothesis themselves, Kalichman and Greely agreed.
The debate over financial interests in papers began to heat up with the mushrooming of the biotechnology industry, Greely said.
It’s no accident that the nation’s three major biotechnology clusters , Boston, San Francisco and San Diego , are nestled around university heavyweights, he added.
But research scientists’ increased ties with profit-driven companies isn’t all bad.
Greely put it this way: “Industry money hasn’t terribly corrupted science, but it’s a concern If scientists do crummy science they lose the respect in which they are held.”
He pointed out, though, that within the last few years more scientists have begun working on problems that have commercial applications. Biotech firms, in turn, tout the presence of trophy scientists on their scientific advisory board or as partners to bolster their image.
Scientists, by contrast, tend not to hype such information.
Kalichman cited another statistic that pointed to potentially hidden research bias.
In 1998, the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatic reviewed 789 papers in the Massachusetts area and, after interviewing the authors, found that 34 percent of articles had a least one author with a financial interest.
Then they looked at 62,000 papers and found that merely 1 out of 200 papers disclosed a financial interest.
‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’
Kalichman speculated the rate of disclosure was low, because journals didn’t pose the question.
Jennings said even journals that say they have a disclosure policy often don’t print the information.
“(Many journals) have a don’t ask, don’t tell policy and editors don’t pursue it,” he said.
One of the reasons he finds is that editors don’t want to discourage submission of papers.
Nature editors do not plan to use the information in deciding whether to publish a paper, but instead let the reader draw their own conclusions, he said.
Kalichman said in a university setting, scientists rely on themselves to act responsibly.
“There are ways to minimize the problems of bias,” he said. Examples range from encoding experiments to handing over critical data.
When it’s submission time though, there is only one right way , and that is to put all cards on the table, he added.
