

Harvard Medical School in Ethics Quandary - lnguyen
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/business/03medschool.html

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physcab
I understand the dilemma and I definitely believe apparent conflicts of
interest should be fully transparent.

With that said, I don't believe that issue is just held to medical schools.

At Florida, all of our faculty's salaries are fully disclosed online. I'm not
sure if its a UF thing or a Florida public school thing. Anyways, any student
can easily lookup how much a certain faculty member is getting paid as well as
where their funds are coming from.

To illustrate a similar ethical dilemma, our group was approached by the
military to research explosives detection technologies. My professor is a
native German and lived in Germany during WWII, and as a result he is an
extreme pacifist. Therefore, we have not taken a dime of military funding
because we have no idea how the technology might be used after a transfer. It
was a difficult decision because in academia a steady cash flow is hugely
important, and the military had deep pockets. Instead, we sought to apply for
the more competitive NSF funding because our interests were purely scientific
and we wanted to keep it that way.

All graduate students should be cognizant of this subtle detail. In most cases
it probably doesn't matter because money is money, but when you present your
work you want to appear as unbiased as possible.

