Immune Response Corp. (IRC), the drug's manufacturer, filed legal documents alleging that the UCSF team had violated its contract for financial support by publishing confidential proprietary material without the company's consent. Three months before the report was scheduled to appear in the Journal of the American Medical Association, IRC, which was paying 35 percent of Kahn's salary to UCSF, demanded that the principal investigator and the university pay $7 million in damages.
Kahn published anyway,1 bringing to light an ethical problem that researchers often end up stewing over in solitude. When corporations pay the bill for research, they may demand control over the final product, and that forces investigators to make the difficult choice between alienating a financial backer and muzzling--or worse, massaging--their results.
"What we need to ask is: If industry is a coequal partner with government, should we give up the illusion that the academic research side is ...
