A new article in Nature magazine laments something that is in vogue to discuss. Many academics are moving to pharma. Of course, none of these articles have shown empirical data that this trend has accelerated. That's okay. We have a paper under review that answers that question. But I would think the first thing you want to know as a journalist is: is this trend actually true? Details, details.
In the meantime, authors are happy to explore reasons why. Some of the reasons noted in the article are bizarre. A proponent of unproven covid testing was told he was discouraged from commenting about the pandemic when he worked at a university (before switching to a company). Yet, I find it hard to believe that universities discouraged people from fear-mongering. Last I checked that seems the explicit goal of many departments (many in Boston).
Someone who's developing an unnecessary gene therapy product that does the same thing as currently available drugs talks about creativity. But what's creative about making a unnecessarily permanent, me-too product? I suspect the market may soon agree with me.
What goes unmentioned is what I think the biggest failure has been. Over the last 3 decades, universities, deprived of State funding, have prostituted themselves to the biopharma industry, building more and more collaborations.
As universities have increasingly made themselves the arm of industry— the job of being a professor becomes interchangeable with working for companies. The biggest reason many faculty are going to pharma is, even before they go, they've been working for them for years.
Consider a field like oncology. The average practicing doctor at a university sees patients, and enrolls on industry run clinical trials. Sometimes they call these investigator initiated. Yet, the industry has green lit the entire process. It's a series of compromises at best, and, most likely, the original idea was obvious, and someone is going to run it one way or the other. For e.g. is “investigator initiated” to combine teclistimab with rev dex. That’s blatantly obvious.
If your faculty job is more and more ad boards and zoom meetings with pharma, then why not switch sides? You basically work on the exact same projects, get paid better, get paid in stock, and have more flexible hours. I would argue it is irrational to stay at a university in such a case.
My concern is that an inaccurate diagnosis of the root issue will lead administrators to exacerbate rather than improve the efflux. Right now, many universities are thinking about ways to make it more pleasant to work at a university as the clinical arm of pharma. Lets make it easier to enroll on trials. But, they have it backwards. If you want to keep people, you have to make the job of being a professor different than working for pharma.
Let’s be honest: that is as it should be. Universities weren’t created to work as CROs of phase 2 studies. They were created to disseminate knowledge and new ideas. To refine our thinking. There are still many at universities keeping this torch alive, against the odds. Universities should work to create faculty positions in the original spirit of the academy: places to think, reflect, write, debate.
They should consider that on their current trajectory, although they will enrich themselves, they will lose the essence of what them valuable in the first place. And of course, they will never be able to make the job more desirable than stock options in a start up, and they will never be able to match salaries.
Universities are working hard to achieve a pyrrhic victory. They just don’t see it yet.
Most importantly: universities are supposed to have tenure.
Tenure is not supposed to be a 'free ride'. Tenure is supposed to give academics the power to speak the truth as a minority opinion without fear of retribution from the government (their employer), including against that government.
If you are funded by tax dolllars, you are de facto a public servant. Yet, the majority academics of academics are self-obsessed careerists. At best, you have virtue signallers and ideologues, with their 'listening sessions' and (always cisgendered) pronouns at the end of their signatures, who are unwilling to take risks for the things they really believe. Why? They have no other choice; it means the difference between having a job or not in a publish-or-perish, cut-throat world.
Academics are *supposed* to be the ones holding the government accountable when non-experts cannot speak to the issues at hand; instead you have thousands of leftist academics betraying the public and calling everyone who disagrees with them 'populists'. On top of the ideological blinders, finally, you have nothing but a system of toxic apologia, because tenure is all about ... funding.
The article referenced can be found here [0], and for those wondering if "A proponent of unproven covid testing was told he was discouraged from commenting about the pandemic when he worked at a university (before switching to a company)" was in fact Michael Mina, spoiler: yes.
And this raises a side question - how in the hell is Michael Mina's reputation not demolished after two years of ridiculous claims which were immediately disproven.
Here's a guy who was given favorable (if not fawning) coverage from Time Magazine, arguing that his rapid test plan could crush Covid because "Countries like Slovakia and the United Kingdom are currently utilizing mass rapid antigen testing programs and already seeing great success." [1]
This article was posted on November 17th, 2020, and apparently no one at Time let alone Michael Mina thought they should check Our World In Data to see if cases were dropping in those countries as claimed (spoiler, they were not [2]), nor did he nor Time issue an apology after cases skyrocketed after that article was published admitting that the idea had now been clearly falsified.
No, he continued to argue for his pseudoscience for the next two years (the cynic me wonders if the fact he worked for a company selling tests might have something to do with it?) and the media continued to give him a platform to peddle his wares [3].
You would think that after Michael Mina caught Covid January 2022, and saw first-hand that the daily tests he took didn't turn positive before symptoms hit (which was the claim he used to justify testing of asymptomatic people - the tests would alert you before you get sick), he might rethink his position.
At the very least, once he became sick and the tests were still negative first 12 hours he would finally realize what Slovakia and the UK realized 2 years earlier - these don't make a difference. [4]
Nope! He keeps on pushing his failed hypothesis!
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[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02088-4
[1] https://time.com/5912705/covid-19-stop-spread-christmas/
[2] https://imgur.com/a/F31a5CV
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/united-kingdom
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/slovakia
[3] https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2021/michael-mina
(At least he repeated the vows correctly: "we are finding, which isn't very surprising, is that the vaccines, despite our great hopes around them, just aren't actually performing as well as we had hoped to stop transmission. I want to be very clear that the greatest benefit, and the greatest thing we could ask for of a vaccine, is that they stop people from going to the hospital. And so they're doing a really good job at that.")
[4] https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/1483116982048329734
3rd tweet down, casually admits that all the rapid tests were negative the first 12 hours of symptoms. Whoops!