"I don't see any conflict of interest involved because my lab is not performing anything for the company, and we are not receiving any funding support from the company," Lee says. "In fact, there is nothing that Cambridge Biotech is doing that is related to my lab, and nothing that my lab is doing now is related to what Cambridge Biotech is doing."

Clinical Trials

Cambridge Biotech

One final type of financial conflict, professors say, is if a professor conducts clinical trials of a drug in which he or she might have some vested interest.

Both Knowles and Gilbert say there is more potential for conflict at the Medical School than in FAS because Medical School professors can help with clinical trials.

In one widely reported example, Scheffer Tseng, a researcher at Harvard and Mass General Hospital, conducted clinical tests of a potential eye treatment in the mid-1980s. The treatment did not work, but it was later disclosed that Tseng had tested patients not authorized to receive the drug and reaped large profits from stock he owned in a company developing it.

Non-Financial Conflicts

BIOGEN

A number of professors say that conflicts of interest can also exist through non-financial means, for example if a professor has some sort of intellectual interest in a company.

"Even if [the professor] has some kind of an intellectual vested interest in a company and also academia, I think it's very difficult to separate responsibilities and commitments to both sides," Gross says.

Gross says he is concerned about the effect of the relationships on students.

"I think that when a senior faculty member is seriously involved with a commercial venture, it is very difficult not to influence the thinking of the young people in their immediate area of responsibility, such as students and post-doctoral fellows," Gross says.

"Because of the increasing economic stringency of the research funds, these young people see the writing on the wall and the behavior of their mentors and they are much more likely to think of more patentable experiments and much less likely to take risks in their research, which is what scientific research is all about," Gross says.

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