Conflicts of Interest Everywhere

The Lancet is engaged in scandalous destruction and obfuscation of data on the relationship between abortion and breast cancer. So goes the story on Businesswire, in which an editorial by Ed Furton in Ethics and Medics journal is credited with making the charge. The story announces the finding by the ethics journal as though Lancet has been caught in a real moral morass. But ... Ethics and Medics, it turns out, is a publication of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, and their editorial was highlighted by the Coalition of Abortion and Breast Cancer. Now who would guess that the charges in the editorial involve the claim that the Lancet and cancer research community in general are deliberately "corrupting scientific research examining the abortion-breast cancer link."

JAMA is running a great set of articles on the relationship between ethics and the bioscience business; Psaty and colleagues review "Potential for Conflict of Interest in the Evaluation of Suspected Adverse Drug Reactions: Use of Cerivastatin and Risk of Rhabdomyolysis," and Brian Strom replies. Fontanarosa, Rennie and DeAngelis discuss drug withdrawals in an accompanying article. Jeremy Sugarman reviews Margaret Eaton's book Ethics and the Business of Bioscience. (subscription required).