* STS Circle at Harvard* *[image: line.gif] * * * *Patrick Taylor* *Children's Hospital, Harvard* * * on
*Virtue, Probability, Relationships and Confusion: Conflicts of Interest and Incompletely Theorized Notions of Scientific Sainthood* ** Monday, January 31st 12:15-2:00 p.m. 124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 100, Room 106 [image: line.gif] Lunch is provided if you RSVP. Please RSVP to sts <[email protected]>@hks.harvard.edu<[email protected]> by 5pm Thursday, January 27th. * * *Abstract:* There is no regulatory consensus on how to address investigators' financial conflicts of interest in biomedical research. Regulations have neither the same objectives, nor similar rules, standards, or procedures. After more than 25 government and association reports and recommendations over the last two decades; the creation of a now vast literature demonstrating links between such payments or financial interests and scientific bias, many forms of clinical trial bias, and publication bias; irresponsible actions by institutional guardians of academic integrity; and the well publicized deaths of research participants in conflict-afflicted clinical trials, regulations remain essentially unchanged. Almost no data exist to support how conflict of interest policies are designed, the effectiveness of these regulatory approaches, or the effectiveness of conflict management plans implemented by universities and research hospitals. How did this occur? Is this law? How should it be remedied? The answers have implications for the impeachment of Presidents, the appointment of Supreme Court Justices, the definition of professional norms, and an old rift within law itself. *Biography*: Patrick Taylor is an Academic Fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. He is concurrently a faculty member at Harvard Medical School. His longstanding, multidisciplinary research interest is the mutual translation and evolution of law and policy imperatives in health care, science policy, biomedical research and biotechnology. He has been actively involved, as a lawyer, on national and international policy-making bodies drawing on his ideas for new norms. His writings, on subjects as diverse as stem cell research, public engagement in science policy-making, the role of IRBs in research conflicts of interest, justice and respect for persons in translational genomic research, clinical network development, patient-controlled electronic medical records, and the ethics of intellectual property, have appeared in leading scientific, science policy and health law journals, including Nature, Science, Cell, and Nature Biotechnology. A complete list of STS Circle at Harvard events can be found on our website: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/
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