A recent and welcome addition to the pharmaceutical blogosphere is PostScript, the blog of The Prescription Project (a sister project of Community Catalyst, which is PAL’s parent organization). PostScript has been featuring a series of fascinating interviews with various medical professionals, on the topic of medical ethics and interactions with the pharmaceutical industry. The latest is “How Hooked Happened: a conversation with Howard Brody, M.D.” Dr. Brody is author of Hooked: Ethics, the Medical Profession, and the Pharmaceutical Industry. Have a look. Here’s a good quote from that interview. I’ve bolded the particularly juicy parts:

Reform has to be a two-pronged thing. First, a professional level of reform: individual physicians growing a certain underdeveloped piece of anatomy….we need our professional spines to be strengthened. And the second piece is regulatory reform: We need to take back medical research from the pharmaceutical industry. There’s got to be some accounting for the bennies [ed: benefits, that is] that these contract research organizations and investigators get from the drug companies.

The public simply cannot demand further tax cuts unless they confront the fact that they are selling medical integrity to the hands of private industry. I think that means we are going to have to pay so that science remains a public good, and not property of the commercial outfits.