There used to be a wonderful cartoon series called 101 Uses for a Dead Cat, which led me 25 years ago to give a talk at a British Association for Psychopharmacology meeting entitled 101 Uses for a Dead Psychiatrist. That was back in the days when Psychopharmacology meetings were places of debate and the British Journal of Psychiatry was guaranteed to have something of real interest in every issue. … [Read more...]
The Shipwreck of the Singular
December 17, 2012 5 Comments
Crusoe’s first appearance was in The Creation of Psychopharmacology, where in recognition of the tensions inherent in medicine between the numerous who enter clinical trials and the single person being treated by a doctor, the book opened with a quote from George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous, in which he notes that: “Crusoe we say was rescued”. Since Oppen wrote these lines, the idea of the … [Read more...]
The Data Access Wars
December 10, 2012 1 Comment
This is the first of three Crusoe posts. For background on Crusoe, see Watch where you wave that wand, The Oedipus Effect, The Tree must go. Beta Centauri was unquestionably a long way from Massachusetts. Somewhat to her surprise Crusoe found breathing no problem, and the temperature seemed just about right. The scenery as they’d come in was not unlike that of a temperate zone on … [Read more...]
Access to clinical trial data: privacy rights, property rights and phoney rights
December 3, 2012 4 Comments
At the European Medicines’ Agency meeting held on November 22nd convened to look at the issue of Access to Clinical Trial Data, the pharmaceutical companies came armed with an approach signaled a few weeks earlier by GSK’s Andrew Witty (see Won't get Fooled Again). The industry panelists came from Lilly and UCB along with a representative from EurorDis Francois Houyez. Possibly for the record, … [Read more...]
