Gadfly or Watchdog?

Campus Report ^ | July 15, 2008 | Bethany Stotts

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Gadfly or Watchdog?

by: Bethany Stotts, July 15, 2008

Some controversies never die. As Accuracy in Academia recently reported, Dr. Alan Schatzberg and around thirty medical researchers are now under investigation by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) for financial conflicts of interest. In Dr. Schatzberg’s case, the conflicts reach as far back as 1998, when he co-founded the company that purchased a patent for mifepristone from Stanford University, his then (and current) employer.

To this day Dr. Schatzberg continues as the principal investigator on Stanford’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to study the anti-depressant effects of mifepristone, an abortion drug. Schatzberg owns $6 million in Corcept Therapeutics stock, according to Senator Grassley.

Surprisingly, my recent article on the subject raised complaints not from Dr. Schatzberg, but from Dr. Bernard Carroll and UCLA Professor Dr. Robert Rubin—two doctors who confronted Dr. Schatzberg for his shoddy science and conflicts-of-interest in 2004.

The two doctors raised much controversy at a Puerto Rico meeting by presenting a poster which compared Dr. Schatzberg’s (and other researchers’) grandiose statements about mifepristone with their financial interest in Corcept Therapeutics. They also criticized several studies’ conclusions about mifepristone’s effectiveness.

Dr. Carroll, speaking also for Dr. Rubin, told this correspondent that Dr. Schatzberg’s “defamatory allegations,” printed by San Jose Mercury news writer Paul Jacobs in 2006, are little more than “smears.” The article written by Jacobs was designed to examine the controversy around Dr. Schatzberg’s scholarship.

Jacobs’ article did refer to the two doctors as “self-appointed guardians of scientific rigor in psychiatric research—gadflies who periodically fire off salvos to journals to complain about papers that don’t measure up to their standards.” However, Jacobs also buried Schatzberg’s claims against the two doctors deep within his story. Jacobs wrote...