Why PLoS Sponsored a Roundtable of Medical Whistleblowers

Editorial Open access, freely available online O n May 15, 2005, the Public Library of Science and the Government Accountability Project, a public interest legal group that advises and supports whistleblowers (www.whistleblower. org), co-sponsored a private meeting near the Capitol Building in Washington, D. C. In the room were four of the most high profi le medical whistleblowers of recent times. All four have gone public with information about practices in medicine and medical research that they believe are risking the public's health or safety [1–5]. One of them was David Graham, Associate Director in the United States Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) Offi ce of Drug Safety, whose research on rofecoxib (Vioxx) pointed to the serious cardiovascular risks of the drug [1]. Graham was speaking in his own capacity and was not representing the FDA. An anonymous fi fth whistleblower—a research scientist at a major drug company—participated by phone. The whistleblowers took turns to share their stories, including their accounts of retaliations they said they had faced from their employers on raising their concerns, which led to lawsuits by at least two of the whistleblowers [2,3]. The picture that emerged from these accounts—a picture of American medicine's inappropriate ties with the pharmaceutical industry— was deeply troubling. As the investigative medical journalist Jeanne Lenzer reports in her Essay for PLoS Medicine [6], the whistleblowers spoke of public regulatory agencies that are putting the interests of drug companies ahead of the safety of patients, and of pharmaceutical companies that allow their marketing departments to knowingly downplay serious side effects when promoting their drugs. And they spoke of the woefully inadequate protection offered to those in the medical community who feel morally compelled to blow the whistle. It was Lenzer who conceived the idea for the meeting. She believed that important lessons would emerge from having these medical whistleblowers, who come from very different professional backgrounds, together in one room to share their experiences. It took her many months of planning. In particular, she needed to gain the trust of the industry research scientist, so that the scientist could feel sure that anonymity would be preserved. But all of her planning nearly came to nothing. At the last moment the original journal sponsor pulled out on the advice of its lawyers. Lenzer's phone call to PLoS, enquiring whether we might step in, came just ten days before the event was due to …