I'm curious to know what researchers think about data suppression and whether they consider it a human subjects issue, academic ethics issue, or something else.
Howard Brody writes about recent new evidence of pharmaceutical companies practicing data suppression for financial gain. But if pharma can do it, surely an individual investigator could.
Without a doubt, data suppression is difficult to detect from the outside. Big pharma collects data from all of their research sites and analyze, clean, and process data without transparency. To manipulate data is frankly too easy and financially tempting.
As you might imagine, I see this as both a human subjects protections issue and an academic/business ethics issue. Let us not fool ourselves, the University is a business center as much as an educational one.
But before we begin to catch data suppression, we as a research community must agree it is a priority for science and the health care industry, and then we can address who should be responsible for investigation and enforcement.
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2 comments:
Thanks for your comment on my blog. I look forward to reading through your archives to see what you have to say.
F.
Data suppression is deeply disturbing. Check out the debate around premption and the FDA. I guess I'm not sure when we can trust those in authority to determine when suppression is in the "best interest" of those who are affected. I think it would be (and has been, if the Patch saga is any indication) pretty arrogant to assume that this best interest can be determined at research stages.
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