What’s more embarrassing than having a non-disclosing psychiatrist like Charles Nemeroff (you can read about him in this Nature editorial) on your university’s staff, regularly raking in six-figure sums from pharmaceutical companies and failing to disclose the fact? Possibly, having such a psychiatrist as the star host of your highly popular radio programme.
National Public Radio, the darling of the US intellectual elite, may be discovering that today, after the New York Times reported that Frederick K. Goodwin, the host of NPR’s award-winning weekly programme, “The Infinite Mind,” didn’t tell the station – or, needless to say, his radio audience – about at least $1.3 million he earned between 2000 and 2007 giving marketing lectures for drug companies.
Just in case you might think there’s no connection, consider this from the Times:
In a program broadcast on Sept. 20, 2005, Dr. Goodwin warned that children with biploar disorder who are left untreated could suffer brain damage, a controversial view. “But as we’ll be hearing today,” Dr. Goodwin reassured his audience, “modern treatments — mood stabilizers in particular — have been proven both safe and effective in bipolar children.”
That very day, GlaxoSmithKline paid Dr. Goodwin $2,500 to give a promotional lecture for its mood stabilizer drug, Lamictal, at the Ritz Carlton Golf Resort in Naples, Fla. Indeed, Glaxo paid Dr. Goodwin more than $329,000 that year for promoting Lamictal, records given Congressional investigators show.
And just who are these “Congressional investigators?” No surprises here: It’s Senator Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican who for over a year has been leading an investigation rooting out academic researchers with undisclosed industry ties. (See Nature news stories here and here.)
NPR has yanked the show off the air, effective immediately. Its vice president, Margaret Low Smith, says the network never would have aired the programme—which receives major underwriting from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health – had it known of Goodwin’s financial interests.
Goodwin, a former chief of the National Institute of Mental Health, told the Times that he is on the payroll of so many companies – according to The Times, in one 2003 paper he reported consulting or speaking for nine of them — that bias in favor of any single one is not a risk: “These companies compete with each other and cancel each other out.”
How’s that for reassuring?