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About Me
Alison Bass is a Pulitzer Prize nominee and author of Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial, which won the NASW Science in Society Award. She was a longtime medical and science writer for The Boston Globe and has also written for The Miami Herald, Psychology Today and MIT's Technology Review, among other publications. A series she wrote for The Boston Globe on psychiatry was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and she has received many other journalism awards. In 2007, she won a prestigious Alicia Patterson Fellowship to write Side Effects. Bass teaches journalism at Mount Holyoke College and Brandeis University.
Category Archives: university industry collaboration
Plot twists in Soderbergh’s new movie Side Effects strain belief
Share I went to see Steven Soderbergh’s new film, Side Effects, with anticipation and dread. The movie, after all, carries the same name as my 2008 book, Side Effects and from what I could tell of the trailers, its plot … Continue reading
Calls for action against authors of controversial Paxil study are getting louder
Share In the wake of GlaxoSmithKline’s record-breaking $3 billion settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, a number of psychiatrists and researchers have redoubled their efforts to get Paxil study 329 retracted. As mentioned here and in other news accounts, the … Continue reading
Posted in antidepressants, clinical trials, conflicts of interest, drug marketing, ghostwriting, National Institutes of Health, pharmaceutical industry, scientific journal retractions, scientific misconduct, university industry collaboration
Tagged antidepressants, Brown University, Department of Justice, GlaxoSmithKline, Health Care Renewal, Martin Keller, oneboringoldman, Paxil
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Why academic researchers involved in fraudulent Paxil study escape scrutiny
Share The Chronicle of Higher Education this week ponders why various universities have taken no action against the academic researchers who co-authored the notorious Paxil study that formed the crux of GlaxoSmithKline’s recent $3 billion settlement with the Department of … Continue reading
Posted in antidepressants, clinical trials, National Institutes of Health, pharmaceutical industry, scientific journal retractions, scientific misconduct, university industry collaboration
Tagged Brown University, Chronicle of Higher Education, Department of Justice, GlaxoSmithKline, Martin Keller, Paxil
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Enforcing anti-kickback laws: a powerful deterrent against ghost-writing in medicine
Share The Obama administration recently made it clear that it will require drug companies to disclose the payments they make to doctors for research, consulting, speaking, travel and entertainment under the new health care law — see the New York … Continue reading
Posted in antidepressants, conflicts of interest, continuing medical education, drug marketing, ghostwriting, pharmaceutical industry, university industry collaboration
Tagged anti-kick statutes, conflicts of interest in medicine, Congress, continuing medical education, corruption, drug and medical device companies
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New drug industry partnership with hospitals could jeopardize patient care
Share We’ve all signed those vague privacy statements when visiting our local hospital for medical care. But how many of us have actually read the fine print and understand that the most sensitive details of our medical lives may be … Continue reading
Taxpayers lose out in Supreme Court ruling on who owns federally funded research
Share The current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine contains a thoughtful essay about who owns federally funded research: the universities who receive the funding or the private companies who contract with academic researchers to develop a specific … Continue reading
French lawmakers may mandate conflict of interest disclosures
Share At a time when our own government has stepped back from requiring true transparency about conflicts of interest in medicine, French lawmakers seem to be heading in a much bolder direction. According to Nature Medicine, the French national assembly … Continue reading
New NIH rules about conflicts of interest are a swiss cheese of loopholes
Share The newly announced rules on financial conflicts of interest among federally funded researchers are certainly an improvement on the existing regulations issued by the National Institutes of Health in 1995 (which were never enforced anyway). But as ethicists and … Continue reading
What’s behind the growing rate of scientific retractions?
Share The retraction of studies in medical and scientific journals has surged in the last decade, according to separate analyses done by the Wall Street Journal and Retraction Watch. In its page-one article today, the Journal noted that while just … Continue reading
With Big Pharma on campus, who is looking after the public interest?
Share Medicare and social services for vulnerable Americans are not the only programs on the chopping block with Washington’s deal to raise the debt ceiling and cut trillions of dollars in government spending. Looming ahead may be deep cuts in … Continue reading