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The FDA Spied On Its Own Scientists
retroworks writes "The New York Times has an interesting article about efforts by the Food and Drug Administration to locate a source of 'leaks' within the agency. The search became a slippery slope involving trojans, keyloggers, screenshot captures, and an investigation that eventually became an allegory for management overkill. The article describes how the investigation of one employee expanded to five, and how the investigation of five led to other staff (including the interception of correspondence to President Obama). The Agency struggled with the gray area between protecting trade secrets of drug companies (which had applied for FDA approval) and censoring researchers with legitimate questions about the Agency's approval process."
Don't employ scientists then. Just employ more bureaucrats.
Science needs to be open and dissent needs to be encouraged. If you want to lock it up in secrecy, then call it something else. It would not be science, and the researchers would not be scientists.
For the FDA, where public safety should be a priority, you would want to have the process be as open as possible. If you feel there is a need to spy on your scientists in order to prevent leaks then it is obvious that public safety is not particularly high on the agenda.
Routing out whisteblowers isn't quality control. And science does just fine without bureaucrats performing quality control. Reproducibility, falsifiability, and peer review (which means an independent review--not your boss) do that better than bureaucrats ever could.
And just in case you are wondering why this is important, RTFA. The scientists felt that the FDA approved medical imaging devices that allowed patients to be exposed to dangerous levels of radiation. The FDA was worried that trade secrets were being released, so they decided to hunt down the whistleblowers. Quality control, right?
the slippery slope of having big-pharma pay for the FDA's testing (as a "cost cutting" maneuver), which then became having the industry itself doing the testing of its own trial products, and by now the FDA is a watch-dog for the industries secrets and guarding their IP, the FDA has become essentially just contract research for the private sector. add that there are good indicators that big-pharma is behind pulling in "campaign contributions" to continue the war on drugs (there's proprietary money in xanax there's none in marijuana) and it's time to just tear down the remains and start a new agency. ...has that ever occurred? i don't think so.
It doesn't matter if congress or the white house got mad. They are not the boss, they are the boss's boss.
Not when your actions are protected by legislation. Then you have no obligation to follow instructions from your boss to the contrary.
If someone takes a job as a scientific researcher for the government they are definitely entitled to follow proper scientific processes. They are putting their name and professional reputation to their work. I'm not a scientist but I have worked in quality control and been pressured to sign off product that did not meet specification. Now I work as a tradesman and I've been pressured to do work that doesn't meet relevant standards. The answer is both cases was no. How could it be otherwise? What's the point of hiring scientists if you don't want them to do science properly?
Read again: A confidential government review in May by the Office of Special Counsel, which deals with the grievances of government workers, found that the scientists' medical claims were valid enough to warrant a full investigation into what it termed "a substantial and specific danger to public safety."
Their job as scientists was to identify that danger to public safety. When the boss didn't want to listen they went to the "boss's boss" and to the public (the boss's boss's boss) via the media, action that is legally protected for this very reason. They were doing their job.
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