What are they waiting for?

In the late 1990's, during one of the booms in the biotech and pharmaceutical fields, a number of faculty members at Harvard Medical School felt they were missing out on the potential financial gains from being affiliated with companies in these sectors.  Such interactions were actually envisioned and indeed encouraged by the Congress in 1980, in the hope of speeding up the adoption of new diagnostics tools, medical devices, and drugs.  The expansion of activity, though, led faculty members to ask Dean Joseph Martin to loosen up the schools' conflict of interest rules to permit more and broader relationships. (I was Administrative Dean of HMS at the time.)  As noted in this article:That review began as the ugly side of conflict problems became evident—notably the death of a patient in a gene-therapy experiment at the University of Pennsylvania. In May 2000, Martin announced that HMS would not modify its policies, and called for national debate on how best to maintain the integrity of research. That work, effected through discussion with peer institutions and through the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), led to model guidelines in 2002.The faculty of the medical school--comprising the professors on The Quad (HMS itself) and the thousands of faculty members in over a dozen Harvard affiliated hospitals--were deeply divided.  One group wanted the policies to be liberalized.  Another group wanted them to be made more strict.  An...
Source: Running a hospital - Category: Health Managers Source Type: blogs