Comment from Laura Borst, International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology

It would be a very good idea to regulate financial conflicts of interest in scientific research, particularly in the medical fields. Lives and also the quality of people's lives are often at stake. Research should not be excessively biased by potentials for profit from financial conflicts of interest. If grants are given for research, researchers should avoid having the quality of their research being tainted by any remuneration, excessive gifts, or other inducements of such conflicts from drug companies. If they are employed by institutions that receive particularly substantial remunerations, they could also be pressured to bias their research to making proposed treatments from companies that give such remunerations appear safer or more efficacious than otherwise. They might be biased towards ignoring data that reveals problems with treatments owned by companies that pay them for their research. Any financial conflicts of interest, if they are present, should be posted on publicly available websites. Such conflicts could impinge on the quality of research. If the Public Health Service funds research, scientists and other researchers engaged in such research should not be receiving remuneration from companies that stand to benefit from such research. If such researchers are used, they could be biased towards manipulating data to make the companies or other interests that fund them appear good. Many researchers have often been involved with ghostwriting arrangements with pharmaceutical companies that paid them and have often only cursorily reviewed the research behind the articles that they were hired to write. There have been problems in the past with pharmaceutical interests holding continuing education classes for physicians in often exotic tourist destinations. Much of this has been detailed in a book authored by Marcia Angell,M.D. titled "The Truth About Drug Companies". Marcia Angell was an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.