Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry has not received his vaccination against controversy. At a debate earlier this week, the presidential-hopeful Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachman criticized the Texas governor’s 2007 mandate requiring all 12-year old girls to receive Merck’s Gardasil vaccine against the cancer-causing human papillomavirus (HPV). Among a list of reasons, she accused Perry of signing the mandate to please a campaign contributor — the vaccine’s maker, New Jersey-based Merck. Since 2000, Merck has donated nearly $30,000 to Perry, according to the Texas Tribune, and Perry’s former chief-of-staff used to lobby for the drugmaker.

But let’s be fair, here: Rick Perry isn’t the only one receiving political donations from pharmaceutical companies. Bachmann herself has received nearly $150,000 from pharma over the course of her career, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The pharmaceutical industry contributed more than $30 million to political causes during the 2010 election cycle alone, according to data compiled by Washington, DC’s Center for Responsive Politics. Pfizer, based in New York, tops the list of contributors, giving more than $1.6 million during the 2010 election cycle, evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, and topping $475,000 for this year alone.

However, these figures are not necessarily complete. Corporations are only required to disclose those donations that go directly to campaigns or lobbyists; contributions to trade associations or interest groups can remain secret. To encourage greater transparency, New York City’s Baruch College released the Baruch Index of Corporate Political Disclosure yesterday, ranking S&P’s leading 100 public companies on a scale from ‘transparent’ to ‘opaque’. The report judged companies on how much and what type of information about political donations they disclose, their contribution policies and how easy it is to find the relevant information on their websites.

As a group, pharmaceutical firms were amongst the most transparent companies, and mega-contributor Pfizer was one of only seven companies rated ‘most transparent.’

“For pharmaceutical companies, reputation is important because they really are consumer companies: they have more interaction with the public,” says Bruce Freed, president and founder of the Center for Political Accountability in Washington, DC. “They recognize that keeping donations mysterious can create problems because it’s something that the public is very sensitive to.”

While the Baruch Report gave Pfizer, Amgen and Merck high transparency ratings, not all pharmaceutical companies fared so well. Notably, Illinois-based Abbott Laboratories was on the low end, in the bracket just above ‘opaque.’ Abbott donated over $1.1 million to campaigns for the 2010 cycle. Additionally, drug distributors CVS and Walgreens were both categorized as ‘opaque.’

The Center for Political Accountability will release its own disclosure report at the end of October, and Freed says the rankings will differ from the Baruch Index. He considers Merck a more transparent company than Pfizer, for example. But Baruch Index author Don Schepers, director of the college’s Robert Zicklin Center for Corporate Integrity, thinks that the more reports that come out, the better. “This will force companies to have a governance conversation, and gives shareholders the opportunity to ask companies much more directly [about donations],” he says. “When indexes start to pop up, companies really do start to alter their behaviors.”

Image: by Flickr user Ano Lobb under Creative Commons

As an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Amanda Herzog worked in a number of different research laboratories where she studied everything from cartilage growth to pediatric tonsillectomy techniques to fruit fly behavior. So, when she started medical school at UW’s School of Medicine and Public Health in 2007, she figured she’d keep up with her research activities. Yet, other than a three-month stint assisting oncologist Mark Albertini in his melanoma lab for a summer research program between her first and second years, Herzog has struggled to fit research into her schedule. “I had to devote my time to my studies,” she says.

Herzog’s passion for lab work inspired her to apply for a unique research program funded jointly by the US National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She succeeded, and became one of the 42 students chosen from hundreds of applicants for the program’s 2010-2011 academic year. As a HHMI–NIH Research Scholar, she was able to defer her third year of medical school and instead study an experimental head and neck cancer drug in cellular and animal models at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland.

For Herzog, the experience was a first step to fulfilling her budding career ambitions. “I would love to have my own lab down the road,” she says, “and this program will help me get my foot in the door.” But other aspiring medical researchers might not be so lucky. On 30 August, the NIH announced plans to replace its existing medical training programs with a new education initiative that, at least initially, will only offer around half the number of spots as were previously available.

HHMI had funded the Research Scholars Program—also known as the Cloister Program because the participants are housed in an old convent on the NIH campus—since its inception in 1985. But the goal all along had been simply to help get the program off the ground, notes William Galey, director of graduate science education program for the Chevy Chase, Maryland-based non-profit. A quarter-century later, with that mission accomplished, HHMI decided to pull its support and invest in other training efforts, such as its international student research fellowships, offered for the first time this year . “It was really time to hand the keys over to the NIH,” Galey says.

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Although all eyes and ears were on the blockbuster Contagion this weekend, another film featuring an epidemic opened in New York City on Friday. We Were Here chronicles San Francisco’s gay community in the 1980s and 1990s as it was engulfed by the very real epidemic of AIDS. Director David Weissman’s time-traveling documentary traces the disease from its surprising emergence and examines the effect it had on a community that ultimately mobilized to hasten medical treatment.

“None of my friends are around from the beginning,” says Daniel Goldstein, an HIV-positive sculptor and one of the documentary’s storytellers, in the film. “So I want to tell their story as much as I want to tell my story.”

Goldstein is one of five voices that narrate the film, all of whom lived through the epidemic in San Francisco. Goldstein’s story is perhaps the most striking for its emotional poignancy — he describes losing two partners to AIDS within a decade — but each narrator dictates a distinct angle. The storytellers embrace neither self-pity nor self-promotion, and their crisp recollections immerse the audience into their community.

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Two researchers who uncovered the action of molecules known as chaperonins and the scientist who characterized the ancient Chinese herbal medicine artemisinin have won the 2011 Lasker Awards for basic and clinical medical research. And, in an unusual twist, an institution, rather than any single person, won the Lasker’s public service prize.

Yale University’s Arthur Horwich and the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry’s Franz-Ulrich Hartl took home the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for showing how protein complexes called chaperonins guide other proteins to assume their proper shape. Protein misfolding has since been linked to the accumulation of protein aggregates in many diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and biotech companies now take advantage of chaperonins to boost protein yields when producing biologic drugs. Horwich tells the “inside story” and Hartl describes the “path to discovery” in our annual Lasker special. (Click on the image to the right to go to a landing page with all of this year’s commentaries.)

This year’s Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award went to Tu Youyou of the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine — the first-ever Chinese recipient of the $250,000 award. Although Chinese herbalists had used the leaves of the Artemisia annua wormwood plant to treat many diseases for centuries, it was Youyou who, in 1972, derived the active ingredient artemisinin, which is now a staple of malaria therapy. In her commentary in Nature Medicine, Youyou describes her discovery and other “gifts from Chinese medicine”.

Rounding out the winners circle, the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center was recognized with the newly rebranded Lasker~Bloomberg Public Service Award, named in honor of New York major Michael Bloomberg, who himself won the public service award in 2009. Clinical Center director John Gallin discusses the hospital’s myriad contributions to clinical investigations and “the future of clinical research” in his commentary.