You Get What You Pay For
Ben Goldacre makes an interesting point in his latest Bad Science column, on the reasons for bias in privately funded pharmaceutical trials:
So science relies on independent replication; but drug trials are so expensive, and state funding of research so miserly, that pharmaceutical research is rarely independently funded. By which, of course, we mean it’s rarely state funded.
I’m totally up for the stuff about the dolphins being good, and big pharma bad. But if only 10% of pharmaceutical research is funded outside the pharmaceutical industry, I’m not convinced that’s entirely the industry’s fault.
People moan about the profits made by drugs companies (and in the UK we nail those profits down in a way that would make your average American businessman start shouting about pinko commies), but if you raised taxes to fund state research into medicines it’s a certainty that they’d grumble even more. And if you expect those drugs companies to fund the research that gets their drugs used (thereby generating the money to fund future research) sometimes you’re going to get results that are biased towards those drugs.
I don’t think the current system is ideal, and I wouldn’t dream of defending those companies who lie about their results in order to secure sales, but, like Goldacre, I do think that the situation is more complex than the “Dolphins-Good-Pharma-Bad” picture seen by most. I’ve attempted to defend the UK pharma industry on this subject to many people in the past, and most of them were unwilling to admit that there might be something in the argument that it’s not entirely our fault. That Goldacre is prepared to make this admission is further evidence that he’s an eminently sensible chap.