The Academy in Peril?

Rude lawyers | Scandal of scientists who take money for papers ghostwritten by drug companies

Michael Pyshnov makes a strong case that his PhD supervisor stole his work and presented it as her own.

This happened during the 80s and Mr. Pyshnov has found some support among the academic community for his allegation that the University of Toronto as an institution has covered up this fraud. Our reading of the story would be that individuals within his department and their superiors took full advantage of Mr. Pyshnov to outsmart him by baiting him to behave bady and lose support.

After 15 years of sustaining this situation, and after his every attempt to make his story known met only complete (and continuing now) silence of the press" his story has become cluttered with bigotted statements which injusticebusters find repugnant. The woman who stole his work is Jewish; anti-Semitic and anti-woman generalizations abound. His hatred of communism leads him to tired Jewish conspiracy theories. Such casual bigotry is as out of place in the university as the bad science and plagiarism he alleges.

Nonetheless, Pyshnov's initial claim seems sound. In the beginning he ran his own case and had his claim against U of T restored in the Court of Appeal of Ontario. This was no small feat since U of T is used to winning. That Pyshnov, in his efforts to take a winnable case to the next step has been turned down by many law firms reflects both the laziness and the class bias of the legal profession where few lawyers are willing to take the time to properly read a file in a controversial case to objectively determine its substance and even fewer are willing to take on a powerful institution like the U of T.

Many people who are interested in higher education -- including the shrinking few who have any hope of ever affording one -- believe universities to be institutions where higher knowledge is attained and moral values are taught in an atmosphere of tolerance and with integrity. Increasingly the academy has become just another stepping stone in the market place where a person can pay his/her tuition and walk away with credentials to better exploit those with less education. The people who practiced their witch-hunting techniques in the Foster Parent and Martensville cases were accredited by Saskatchewan Universities and almost without exception the people they branded as witches were less educated than they were. You don't need a Doctor of Philosophy to recognize such practices are immoral and unethical. Police academies are also facing up to the fact that the conduct of their graduates reflects on the integrity of the teaching. They should be ashamed that Brian Dueck is behaving like he received his training from the SS.

injusticebusters find that injustices are most often the result of moral and ethical carelessness or indifference on the part of persons who are paid large salaries to be careful and to know their jobs (professsors, judges, heads of companies.) In a society driven by the profit motive, it is not surprising that people steal each others' work and ideas. The law is weighted in favour of legalizing the theft of the ideas and work of the weaker by those with more power. Nonetheless the justice system provides avenues for such thefts to be prosecuted when clear evidence exists. Maintaining civility throughout the process is important if justice is to prevail. Comments like those made by Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin this summer | Chief judge wants Supreme Court to have control over which cases it hears | give further reason to ask what universities are teaching! That the head of our Supreme Court wishes to lighten her work-load by limiting access to justice shows a frightening shallowness of mind.

The driving aims of injusticebusters.com are to bring to account those who abuse their power and to encourage the open, public discussion of the issues involved. Remedies should be sought and damages compensated. Character assassination has no legitimate place in any part of the process.

The rage which many spouses feel at having been unfairly treated in divorce and family courts is palpable as we watch the news reports of the results of violent rages by aggrieved parties. What we need to repair the damage done by a couple decades of carelessness are reputable institutions run by trained, intelligent and dedicated professionals. Our courts and our universities should be those institutions.

Lawyers, don't be so rude: Recommendation made to improve courtroom etiquette

By Janice TibbettsSoutham Newspapers, August 15, 2001

Canada's lawyers have become so rude that they need a basic etiquette course to eradicate antics like yelling at witnesses and making faces and noises at each other while sipping their Starbucks coffee in the courtroom, a legal conference was told Tuesday.

"Play down your Gladiator-like instincts," advised Justice David Jenkins of the Prince Edward Island Supreme Court.

An Ontario judge painted a dismal picture of "the breakdown of civility" in his small Orangeville courtroom that would make Miss Manners shudder.

Justice Emile Kruzick of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice said he and clients often have to wait for late lawyers who finally waltz in with their coffee, muffin, and sometimes a newspaper they blatantly read during court proceedings.

Others, he said, make faces and sigh, moan or roll their eyes during their opponents' arguments and torment witnesses. Some lawyers don't bother to stand when addressing the judge and sometimes they address each other directly instead of communicating through the bench, breaking a sacred rule of the courtroom.

"I sometimes have to say, `hello, I'm here,' " said Kruzick. "And then there are counsel who openly show displeasure by facial expressions or other mannerisms on which I won't elaborate."

About 30 of the 800 lawyers at the annual gathering of the Canadian Bar Association attended the panel discussion on manners and the dismal attendance was noted by the participating lawyers and judges.

Both the bench and the bar asserted that the aggressive nature of the business, in which lawyers are expected to act like "attack dogs" for their clients, simply breeds bad manners. And lack of decorum goes far beyond the courtroom: it permeates telephone calls to clients and discussions between opposing lawyers on a case, who are routinely given to shouting at each other and sending nasty e-mails.

"There is an expectation, a demand by clients that from the beginning of their file we advocate fully, forcefully, fearlessly and sometimes fiercely on their behalf," said Prince Edward Island lawyer Ron Profit. "To be civil, calm and courteous is seen by some clients and opposing counsel as too cowardly, too co-operative and negligent."

Profit served up "stress-busting" tips that he said get to the root of the rudeness problem: overworked lawyers who are three times more prone to alcoholism and drug addiction than the population as a whole and six times more likely to commit suicide.

His list includes dozens of simple tips, which read much like the popular self-help book Don't Sweat the Small Stuff. Among them is to have a "buddy lawyer" to keep an eye on each other and talk out problems. Others include apologizing when wrong, taking time for lunch every day, meeting with people in person instead of over the phone because it's harder to be rude to someone's face, and rejecting the "Hollywood" image of lawyers that "glamourizes rudeness and incivility in our profession."

Be sure and check out our fall-winter 2002 story of rude, bullying prosecutors and a judge who could go to manner school as injusticebusters seek a fair hearing for Tracey Marcotte. This one is still unfolding.

Scandal of scientists who take money for papers ghostwritten by drug companies: Doctors named as authors may not have seen raw data

Sarah Boseley, health editor Thursday February 7, 2002 The Guardian

Scientists are accepting large sums of money from drug companies to put their names to articles endorsing new medicines that they have not written - a growing practice that some fear is putting scientific integrity in jeopardy.

Ghostwriting has become widespread in such areas of medicine as cardiology and psychiatry, where drugs play a major role in treatment. Senior doctors, inevitably very busy, have become willing to "author" papers written for them by ghostwriters paid by drug companies.

Originally, ghostwriting was confined to medical journal supplements sponsored by the industry, but it can now be found in all the major journals in relevant fields. In some cases, it is alleged, the scientists named as authors will not have seen the raw data they are writing about - just tables compiled by company employees.

The doctors, who may also give a talk based on the paper to an audience of other doctors at a drug company-sponsored symposium, receive substantial sums of money. Fuller Torrey, executive director of the Stanley Foundation Research Programmes in Bethesda, Maryland, found in a survey that British psychiatrists were being paid around $2,000 (£1,400) a time for symposium talks, plus airfares and hotel accommodation, while Americans got about $3,000. Some payments ran as high as $5,000 or $10,000.

"Some of us believe that the present system is approaching a high-class form of professional prostitution," he said.

Robin Murray, head of the division of psychological medicine at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, is one of those who has become increasingly concerned. "It is clear that we have a situation where, when an audience is listening to a well-known British psychiatrist, you recognise the stage where the audience is uncertain as to whether the psychiatrist really believes this or is saying it because they them selves or their department is getting some financial reward," he said.

"I can think of a well-known British psychiatrist I met and I said, 'How are you?' He said, 'What day is it? I'm just working out what drug I'm supporting today.'"

Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, wrote a year ago that when she ran a paper on antidepressant drug treatment, the authors' financial ties to the manufacturers - which the journal requires all contributors to declare - were so extensive that she had to run them on the website. She decided to commission an editorial about it and spoke to research psychiatrists, but "we found very few who did not have financial ties to drug companies that make antidepressants."

She wrote: "Researchers serve as consultants to companies whose products they are studying, join advisory boards and speakers' bureaus, enter into patent and royalty arrangements, agree to be the listed authors of articles ghostwritten by interested companies, promote drugs and devices at company-sponsored symposiums, and allow themselves to be plied with expensive gifts and trips to luxurious settings. Many also have equity interest in the companies."

In September her journal joined the Lancet and 11 others in denouncing the drug companies for imposing restrictions on the data to which scientists are given access in the clinical trials they fund. Some of the journals propose to demand a signed declaration that the papers scientists submit are their own.

The success of Prozac, the antidepressant which became a cult "happy" drug in the 1990s, substantially raised the stakes in psychiatry. Its promotion coincided with the decline of state funding for research, leaving scientists in all areas of medicine dependent on pharmaceutical companies to fund or commission their work. That in turn gave the industry unprecedented control over data and ended with research papers increasingly being drafted by company employees or commercial agencies.

The responsibility of scientists for the content of their papers takes on serious significance in the context of court cases in the US, where relatives of people who killed themselves and murdered others while on SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) - the class of drug to which Prozac belongs - claimed the drugs were responsible. According to David Healy, a north Wales-based psychopharmacologist who has given evidence for the families, the companies have relied on articles apparently authored by scientists who may in fact have not seen the raw data.

Dr Healy, who had unprecedented access to the data that the companies keep in their archives, said: "It may well be that 50% of the articles on drugs in the major journals across all areas of medicine are not written in a way that the average person in the street expects them to be authored."

He cites the case brought last year against the former SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline) by relatives of Donald Schell. The court found that the company's best-selling antidepressant, an SSRI called Seroxat, had caused Schell to murder his wife, daughter and granddaughter and commit suicide.

The company's defence was based on scientific papers which analysed the results of trials comparing Seroxat with a placebo and found there was no increased risk of suicide for depressed people on Seroxat. But the raw data probably does not support that, argues Dr Healy. Some of the placebo suicides took place while patients were withdrawing from an older drug. When the figures are readjusted without these, he says, they show there is substantially increased risk of suicide on Seroxat.

This raises the question of whether the eminent scientists whose names were on the papers ever saw the raw data from the trials - or saw only tables compiled by company employees, he says. David Dunner, a professor at the University of Washington, who co-authored one of the papers in 1995, admits he did not see the raw data. "I don't know who saw it. I did not," he said. "My role in the paper was that the data were presented to us and we analysed it and wrote it up and wrote references."

His co-author Stuart Montgomery, then of St Mary's hospital medical school in London, declined to answer calls and emails from the Guardian. The third name on the paper is that of Geoff Dunbar, a company employee.

The World Health Organisation has expressed concern about the ties between industry and researchers. Jonathan Quick, director of essential drugs and medicines policy, wrote in the latest WHO Bulletin: "If clinical trials become a commercial venture in which self-interest overrules public interest and desire overrules science, then the social contract which allows research on human subjects in return for medical advances is broken."

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