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Hired education: a hidden culprit in the drug scandals: the increasingly corporatized university.

Article Excerpt
M. MICHAEL WOLFE, A GASTROENTEROLOGIST at Boston University, admits he was duped by the Pharmacia Corporation, the manufacturer of the blockbuster arthritis drug Celebrex. (In 2003, the company was purchased by Pfizer.) In the summer of 2000, The Journal of the American Medical Association asked Wolfe to write a review of a study showing that Celebrex was associated with lower rates of stomach and intestinal ulcers and other complications than two older arthritis medications, diclofenac and ibuprofen. Wolfe found the study, tracking 8,000 patients over a six-month period, persuasive, and penned a favorable review, which helped to drive up Celebrex sales.

But early the next year, while serving on the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) arthritis advisory committee, Wolfe had occasion to review the same drug trial again, and was flabbergasted by what he saw. Pharmacia's study had run for one year, not six months, as the company had originally led both Wolfe and the Journal to believe. When the complete data was considered, most of Celebrex's advantages disappeared because the ulcer complications that occurred during the second half of the study were disproportionately found in patients taking Celebrex.

"I am furious" Wolfe told The Washington Post in 2001. "I looked like a fool. But ... all I had available to me was the data presented in the article." Remarkably, none of the Journal study's 16 authors, including eight university professors, had spoken out publicly about this egregious suppression of negative data. All the authors were either employees of Pharmacia or paid consultants of the company.

Celebrex, an anti-inflammatory drug similar to Vioxx, is once again in the news due to concerns that it may be associated with the same cardiovascular risks that caused Vioxx to get yanked from the market. In recent months, we've heard a great deal about conflicts of interest at both the FDA, the agency that approves drugs for public safety, and the National Institutes of Health, where publicly funded scientists moonlight as consultants for the very companies that manufactured the drugs they are testing. Still largely ignored, however, is the role played by the once-autonomous ivory tower and the university scientists who, either knowingly or unknowingly, facilitate the pharmaceutical industry's manipulation of drug testing by lending it an aura of objectivity.

Today, market forces are dictating what is happening in the world of higher education as never before, causing universities to look and behave more and more like business enterprises. Instead of honoring their traditional commitment to teaching, disinterested research, and the broad dissemination of knowledge, universities are aggressively striving to become research arms of private industry. Faced with declining government funding, they are avidly seeking to enhance their role as "engines" of economic growth, promising state legislators and governors that they will help drive regional economic development by pumping out commercially valuable inventions.

This radical redefinition of the university's mission can be traced back to the economic stagnation of the 1970s. Propelled by heightened competition from Germany and Japan, Congress passed landmark legislation in 1980 that allowed universities...