Drug Companies Create Conflicts at the NIH

I want to thank you for the enlightening “Stealth Merger: Drug Companies and Government Medical Research” (Dec. 7), on the National Institutes of Health. Though it’s common knowledge that many congressmen are in the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry, I found it scary that even what is supposed to be straight science is clearly being diverted to the cause of remunerations from the industry.

While I also knew that most of the really new and good drugs came from NIH research and then were capitalized on, free, by the drug industry, I had always, like most people, assumed that the research at the NIH was not biased against the lives of American seniors and others who needed medications. I guess the concepts of conflict of interest and basic ethics apply only to those not tied to our government and its agencies.

Gary Orthuber

Oxnard

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The problems of conflicts of interest are rife throughout our government. We appear to have created a revolving door of employees coming from and going to positions in major industries, people in a position to dictate the basis for the legislation of life-and-death matters for our citizens. Collecting dual incomes during one’s tenure of employment brings this problem to new heights of legalized corruption. The problem goes much further than just insisting employees reveal outside income that has the appearance of such conflicts.

In the “profession” of prostitution, not only the whores are arrested but also the johns who hire them. When will our country’s “biostitutes,” as scientists are called when they color their research findings for profit or simply to curry political favor from higher-ups, be joined in criminal prosecution by the “seducing” industries that corrupted them?

In the meantime, I suggest that all NIH memos and documents produced by staff members contain the same declarations of competing interests that some journals require before publishing scientific findings.

Barbara Rubin

New York City

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Your story about the NIH doctors and the pharmaceutical industry brought back memories. When I first started a medical practice over 50 years ago, one of the detail men (from a pharmaceutical company) caught me in the hall and told me that I was the main topic discussed at their meeting the evening before: “Who had gotten in to see Dr. Miller -- no one!” Then, 19 years ago, when I retired from the group I helped start, a detail man was there to give me a present -- a potted plant. He said he was finally able to give Dr. Miller a present. We need a Diogenes now, searching with a lantern for an honest man.

Woodrow Miller MD

Los Angeles

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It is not the pharmaceutical companies that we should blame. They are doing what any corporation in our market economy is supposed to do -- make a profit in any way that they can. They are not responsible for the common good of our nation. Since the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act [allowing federally funded researchers to profit from their research] almost a quarter of a century ago, the people of the U.S. have been betrayed by their government -- a government that has forgotten the constitutional requirement “to promote the general welfare.”

It is a lesson to be remembered in these days when we are bombarded by the tales of the evils of government regulation. It is the responsibility of our government to give priority to the common good of the American people. It is the responsibility of the citizens of this land to demand no less.

Jean Raun

Laguna Beach