Thursday, April 30, 2009

Damn straight!


Taking free lunches from company salespeople, giving paid lectures on their behalf and other practices ''erode public trust while providing no meaningful benefits to patients or society,'' Institute of Medicine panel chair Dr. Bernard Lo.


Bernard Lo, M.D. is Professor of Medicine and Director of the Program in Medical Ethics at the University of California, San Francisco. He is National Program Director for the Greenwall Faculty Scholars Program in Bioethics. He is co-chair of the Standards Working Group of the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, which will recommend regulations for stem cell research funded by the state of California. He also serves on the Data and Safety Monitoring Committees for diabetes prevention trials and a HIV vaccine trial at NIAID. He is a member of the Ethics Working Group of the NIH-sponsorsed HIV Prevention Trials Network, which carries out clinical trials in developing countries. He is co-Director of the Policy and Ethics Core of the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at UCSF, which provides technical advice and consultation to researchers carrying out clinical research, including research in resource-poor nations. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and serves on the IOM Council. He has been involved in a number of studies on ethical issues in human participants research carried out by the IOM and the National Academy of Science (NAS). He chaired a IOM panel on confidentiality in health services research. He developed a course on Responsible Conduct of Research that 120 postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty take each year. He also carries out research on ethical issues in human participants research, end-of-life decisions, and stem cell research. He is a practicing general internist and attends on the impatient medical service at UCSF.

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