The University of Pennsylvania was so eager to clear its psychiatry-department chairman and a colleague of ghostwriting charges that it disregarded an offer to review documents proving their hidden corporate author, a faculty whistle-blower has charged.
The company that employed the outside author, Scientific Therapeutics Information, agreed to give Penn documents showing that Dwight L. Evans, its chairman of psychiatry, and Laszlo Gyulai, an associate professor of psychiatry, were not the original authors of a 2001 journal article, according to a complaint filed Tuesday on behalf of Jay D. Amsterdam, a professor of psychiatry at Penn.
The university, however, “intentionally chose not to review these highly probative documents,” Bijan Esfandiari, a lawyer for Dr. Amsterdam, said Tuesday in a letter to the federal government’s Office of Research Integrity. “The university’s struthious approach to the probative and available STI documents is disturbing and creates the impression that its inquiry was anything but intended to discover the truth.”
The case involves a June 2001 article in The American Journal of Psychiatry that Dr. Amsterdam has described as overstating the benefits and understating the risks of the antidepressant drug Paxil. Dr. Amsterdam has cited evidence that Scientific Therapeutics Information was hired by Paxil’s manufacturer, SmithKline Beecham, now known as GlaxoSmithKline, and that two STI writers largely produced the article that listed five university authors, including Drs. Evans and Gyulai.
Additional listed authors include researchers from Harvard University, the University of Miami, and the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio. While the University of Pennsylvania conducted a review that absolved Drs. Evans and Gyulai of participating in ghostwriting, the other three universities have not chosen to investigate their faculties’ roles, Mr. Esfandiari said.
A spokesman for the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio, Will C. Sansom, said the office of the vice president for research “conducted an internal review and found no merit to the assertions” concerning Charles L. Bowden, then the Texas institution’s chairman of psychiatry, who was listed as an author of the June 2001 article. Officials at Harvard and the University of Miami did not respond to requests for comment.
Haunted by Questions
Universities have come under growing pressure in recent years from internal and external critics, including in Congress, to crack down on the practice of researchers allowing their names to be placed on medical-journal articles that are actually written by companies with an interest in the drug or device being studied.
The ghostwriting complaint raised by Dr. Amsterdam has gained particular attention because of the reputation of the institutions, the prominence of the researchers, and the extent of corroborating documentation. In addition, the president of Penn, Amy Gutmann, is chairman of the federal government’s Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.
Penn has rejected suggestions that Ms. Gutmann step down from the presidential bioethics commission while she resolves the complaint against her faculty, and the university has declined to make public its investigative review of the case. In that review, the university acknowledged Drs. Evans and Gyulai allowed their names to be listed on the June 2001 journal article but said they deserved no sanction because the article was published before new university rules and journal standards expressly forbidding ghostwriting went into effect.
Critics of that decision include Jeffrey R. Lacasse, an assistant professor of social work at Arizona State University, and Jonathan Leo, an associate dean of students and associate professor of neuroanatomy at Lincoln Memorial University. In a commentary published May 31 in the Springer journal Society, Mr. Lacasse and Mr. Leo contend that the Penn review asked the wrong question. Penn spent its investigation showing that Drs. Evans and Gyulai made some contributions to the article but entirely side-stepped the key question of whether it failed to properly note the STI writers, led by Sally K. Laden, who contributed the bulk of the writing, Mr. Lacasse and Mr. Leo said.
“The primary conclusions of the University of Pennsylvania investigation did not result from scrutinizing the paper for a ghostwriter, but were instead explanations for why the listed authors deserved to be on the byline,” they wrote.
Mr. Esfandiari, in his letter Tuesday, asked the Office of Research Integrity to obtain the STI documents that he said Penn declined to review.
A spokesman for Penn, Stephen J. MacCarthy, declined Tuesday to say if or why the university chose not to review the documents from STI. “This was thoroughly investigated, and we stand by our original statement,” Mr. MacCarthy said.
