Good one.
On top of that, he also has the defeatist’s attitude of giving up because it’s all just too hard.

http://xkcd.com/1132/

Legislators, government regulators, professional journals and research facilities at all levels are bought and paid for by the likes of Monsanto and Merck.

Argument by blatant assertion is silly.

as long as profit is the motive, true transparency and ethical behavior will only exist in Fantasyland. Legislators, government regulators, professional journals and research facilities at all levels are bought and paid for by the likes of Monsanto and Merck. They buy the studies, they write the laws, they bury unfavorable studies, they fund the universities that do the research — they invent the ‘science.’ Their behavior throughout history clearly demonstrates that they don’t care about anything but next quarter’s bottom line.

Some of the details are here:

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/pace_trial_recovery_rates_and_po#outgoing-231592

Requiring researchers to publish data in the manner laid out in their protocol seems such a basic first step…. but it’s still not happening, because it’s not in the interests of a lot of those with power and authority.

Profit and transparency are inversely correlated. That whole pesky “efficient markets hypothesis” thing. Yves Smith has pointed out that the most transparent markets are, by definition, the least profitable.

(“profitable” in the narrow sense of near-term net to the legally constituted private resource “owners” — not to the broader commonwealth)

this New England Journal of Medicine article proposed legislation to improve clinical trials.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1209433?query=TOC&

“On August 2, 2012, Representative Edward Markey (D-MA) introduced into the U.S. Congress the Trial and Experimental Studies Transparency (TEST) Act (H.R. 6272) to close these loopholes. The TEST Act expands reporting requirements under existing federal law by broadening the scope to include all interventional studies of drugs or devices, regardless of phase (i.e., including phase 1), design (i.e., including single-group trials), or approval status (i.e., making no distinction between trials of approved vs. unapproved products); requiring all foreign trials that are used to support marketing in the United States to be registered; mandating results reporting for all trials within 2 years after study completion (including trials of unapproved drugs or devices); and extending results reporting to include the deposition of consent and protocol documents approved by institutional review boards.”

Every year I ask groups for data that is supposed to be public, but really isn’t, usually not for clinical trials, but rather big array data measuring mRNA abundances in tumors (and such). Sometimes the data actually is public, but the clinical variables aren’t, or I can’t tell which sample in the repository corresponds to which one in the paper’s supplementary tables so I can’t piece it together, or it’s data so raw I could never reproduce their processed data. Anyway, they often write back, asking if my group would like to collaborate, and are essentially saying they won’t give it up – I should understand how much it cost them to obtain it, blah, blah, blah.

That is extortion. To agree to the terms is rewarding the extortioner, and will help perpetuate the practice. Never agree to it. Th extortioner is harming scientific progress and patients (unless the research has no practical future benefit – not an argument you’ll hear from many).
As a reviewer check to see that data is available, complete, and in good order. If not, the paper cannot be adequately reviewed.

I am always tempted to write the journal and demand the data be made public or else they should retract the paper, and sometimes I do that and with success, but usually I say nothing cause the other group will likely know exactly who the provocateur was.

1. Tenure. Tenure committees, by and large, consider positive results more favorably than negative. This is not only unfair to candidates for tenure (no matter how capable and careful the scientist, they cannot ensure ahead of time that their hypotheses will be correct), it discourages the publication of negative results. If nothing else because the time invested in getting the negative paper written and published cannot be spent on work the committee will like better.

This one really calls for a cultural change in science, where it is more broadly accepted that negative results are just as important and valuable as positive. It’ll be hard, but necessary. (Whether the entire tenure concept really makes sense to keep is a different question, but anything which replaces it would likely have the same problem built in without cultural change.)

2. Journals. Simply put, papers are published in journals if it is profitable to do so. That’s just broken. Initiatives like PLoS attempt to address this, but medicine is still far behind some other disciplines in this regard (e.g. physics and arXiv).