Jennifer Washburn

Elias Zerhouni, director of the US National Institutes of Health, last week took one small step along the road to repairing the tainted ethical reputation of government science. New conflict-of-interest rules that he announced will at last bar NIH scientists from moonlighting as consultants for private industry. The move follows a series of investigations by The Los Angeles Times and the US Congress that uncovered extensive financial ties -- many previously undisclosed -- between agency scientists and the drug and… more

M. Michael Wolfe, a gastroenterologist at Boston University, admits he was duped by the Pharmacia Corporation, the manufacturer of the blockbuster arthritis drug Celebrex. (In 2003, the company was purchased by Pfizer.) In the summer of 2000, The Journal of the American Medical Association asked Wolfe to write a review of a study showing that Celebrex was associated with lower rates of stomach and intestinal ulcers and other complications than two older arthritis medications, diclofenac and ibuprofen. Wolfe found the… more

A four-year college degree has become all but a necessity for getting ahead in the information age. Since the 1980s the average real income of workers with only a high school diploma has fallen, while salaries among those with at least a college degree have risen: they now earn 75 percent more than high school graduates. At the national level, having a highly educated work force is critical in order to sustain our technological edge in the global economy.

America's… more

In asking the university to become more commercial in its orientation, we must not kill the goose that lays the golden egg.

Since passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, which encouraged universities to patent federally funded inventions, university-industry collaborations have exploded. Universities operate their own venture capital firms to finance start-up companies, hold equity in professors' companies and seek to generate royalty income from their faculty's research -- all of which has brought commercial imperatives directly into the heart of… more

In August of 2000 the National Center for Children in Poverty, at Columbia University, released a study showing that despite the country's recent economic boom, 13 million American children were living in poverty -- three million more than in 1979. For most Americans that was unsettling news, but for a small group of publicly traded companies it represented an opportunity. As the ranks of children living in poverty have grown during the past two decades, so have the… more

At one end of the long conference table sat the lawyer, a tall man with silver-and-black hair, prominent cheekbones and a Baltimore accent, dressed in a charcoal-gray suit and white pin-stripe shirt with monogrammed cuffs. The others seated at the table wore lightweight dresses, bluejeans, overalls, cowboy boots and trucker caps. Their faces were somber and expectant. Some had driven hundreds of miles to Tulsa to be here.

The lawyer began the meeting with two questions. "Why did you… more

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has long been the target of both industry and ideological forces seeking to scale back regulation. With a Republican now in the White House, conservatives are once again sounding the call. On February 2, The Wall Street Journal published an editorial railing against the FDA's "costly and archaic system of drug regulation." Enabling consumers to access the "wonder drugs" of the twenty-first century, the Journal argued, requires eliminating "the last century's regulations."

President… more

Most Americans do not realize that they collectively own many of our nation's most valuable resources -- public assets worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet too many common assets are not managed in the public's best interest. It could be called the enclosure of the American commons -- the private appropriation of public forests, minerals, electromagnetic spectrum, government research and information, civic spaces and dozens of other assets owned by the American people. These practices encourage overuse, deprive taxpayers… more

Last March, Arthur Levine, the president of Columbia University's Teachers College, predicted in a New York Times op-ed article that information technology may soon make the traditional brick-and-mortar university obsolete. … more

On April 14, 1998, two days after Easter, Janice Lacy called the Appleridge group home in Houston, Texas, to see how her sister Trenia had spent the holiday. "They… more