Ironic that Stanford Medical School is located at 300 Pasteur Drive. Ironic, because Pasteur's transformational research on bacteria was financed largely by the beer and wine industry as were most of his writings, lectures and travels on the subject.
Which means that Dr. Pasteur would have been been banned from doing such research and promoting it's value by Stanford. Instead, the funding would have gone to the dean of the medical school and a group of bureaucrats more interested in political correctness than medical progress. According to the new Stanford medical school policy on industry support for medical education, "the faculty, in conjunction with the office of CME, will decide the choice of topic and content for all Stanford CME activities, and curricula will be chosen based on the educational needs of our learner populations."
http://deansnewsletter.stanford.edu/#1
And as we all know, academics are free of any bias and never seek to steer money away from approaches they don't believe in and funnel cash to their own pet theories.
Which means that Pasteur, whose original ideas were rejected and ridiculed would have been labeled as "corrupted" by industry funding and would never have seen the light of day. CME would have gone instead to supporting treatments of disease based on spontaneous generation. Pasteur's subsequent work on the anthrax and rabies vaccine would be similarily attacked for it too had industry funding.
Pasteur challenged the dogma of the time and challenged his critics to attack him not in terms of circular and self-justifying arguments but by engaging in their own experimental research.
Attack my experiments," he challenged his critics. "Prove that they are incorrect instead of trying new ones that are merely variants of mine, but into which you introduce errors that then have to be pointed out to you."
Sadly today, that spirit is being extinguished by the new religion of politically correct science. When the Dean of one of the finest medical schools in the country claims "the historical and traditional models of CME, based largely on lectures and discussion groups, have served a purpose, although their impact on truly enhancing medical knowledge that leads to improvements in health care outcomes is unresolved" he is parroting the catechisms of a anti-science caste who believe, without evidence, that commercial support of research, training and symposium have an adverse impact on public health.
Simply handing the CME cash over to medical schools is problematic particularly if the role of CME in health improvement is unresolved. And if Dean Pizzo and others truly believe that, then they should be not responsible for the nearly $1 billion in industry support for such activities. For all the prattle about lack of accountability in CME, their is no murkier moral or intellectual stew than an academic department at a major university or no entity better at siphoning dollars for overhead, salaries and indirect expenses.
The larger issue, that men and women of insight and teaching talent might find themselves barred by universities of promoting ideas and interests they have researched remains. So does the fact that medical schools have largely failed to serve the primary care and nonphysician workers who treat the medically underserved, those health care providers who don't have the money or the luxury of an tony academic appointment or CME cash.
As with all myopic ideological movements, the attack on industry support of CME has casualties. Public health will be one. Truth another. As Pasteur put it, "In each of us there are two men, the scientist and the man of faith or doubt. The two domains are distinct, and woe unto him who seeks to make the one encroach upon the other in the current imperfect state of our knowledge."
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~agoldham/articles/pasteur.htm
Which means that Dr. Pasteur would have been been banned from doing such research and promoting it's value by Stanford. Instead, the funding would have gone to the dean of the medical school and a group of bureaucrats more interested in political correctness than medical progress. According to the new Stanford medical school policy on industry support for medical education, "the faculty, in conjunction with the office of CME, will decide the choice of topic and content for all Stanford CME activities, and curricula will be chosen based on the educational needs of our learner populations."
http://deansnewsletter.stanford.edu/#1
And as we all know, academics are free of any bias and never seek to steer money away from approaches they don't believe in and funnel cash to their own pet theories.
Which means that Pasteur, whose original ideas were rejected and ridiculed would have been labeled as "corrupted" by industry funding and would never have seen the light of day. CME would have gone instead to supporting treatments of disease based on spontaneous generation. Pasteur's subsequent work on the anthrax and rabies vaccine would be similarily attacked for it too had industry funding.
Pasteur challenged the dogma of the time and challenged his critics to attack him not in terms of circular and self-justifying arguments but by engaging in their own experimental research.
Attack my experiments," he challenged his critics. "Prove that they are incorrect instead of trying new ones that are merely variants of mine, but into which you introduce errors that then have to be pointed out to you."
Sadly today, that spirit is being extinguished by the new religion of politically correct science. When the Dean of one of the finest medical schools in the country claims "the historical and traditional models of CME, based largely on lectures and discussion groups, have served a purpose, although their impact on truly enhancing medical knowledge that leads to improvements in health care outcomes is unresolved" he is parroting the catechisms of a anti-science caste who believe, without evidence, that commercial support of research, training and symposium have an adverse impact on public health.
Simply handing the CME cash over to medical schools is problematic particularly if the role of CME in health improvement is unresolved. And if Dean Pizzo and others truly believe that, then they should be not responsible for the nearly $1 billion in industry support for such activities. For all the prattle about lack of accountability in CME, their is no murkier moral or intellectual stew than an academic department at a major university or no entity better at siphoning dollars for overhead, salaries and indirect expenses.
The larger issue, that men and women of insight and teaching talent might find themselves barred by universities of promoting ideas and interests they have researched remains. So does the fact that medical schools have largely failed to serve the primary care and nonphysician workers who treat the medically underserved, those health care providers who don't have the money or the luxury of an tony academic appointment or CME cash.
As with all myopic ideological movements, the attack on industry support of CME has casualties. Public health will be one. Truth another. As Pasteur put it, "In each of us there are two men, the scientist and the man of faith or doubt. The two domains are distinct, and woe unto him who seeks to make the one encroach upon the other in the current imperfect state of our knowledge."
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~agoldham/articles/pasteur.htm
