There are many ways to drive medicine forward. One is to work to remove economic, political, or geographic barriers to accessing care, and thus aid those whose suffering can be assuaged but is not being so. Another is to work to develop treatments for types of suffering poorly eased (or addressed) by current care. Both are important. Serious pursuit of the second strategy, however, requires the participation of industry; to translate bench science into benefits for real people will usually require manufacture of new medicines or devices, a function that universities and public institutions do not do but industry does well.
But for those students, like myself, currently training in MD-PhD programs in hopes of pursuing this goal of translational medicine, it is not at all clear what attitude we should take towards industry. On the one hand, the vision to move science from bench to bedside would seem best served by those clinician-scientists who do not see publication as the end result but are devoted to responsibly guiding their discoveries into the industrial setting and propelling them to patients. On the other hand, connections between industry and academia are often described categorically as “conflicts of interest” that must be disclosed and ideally divested. I will not attempt to comment here on the events that have led to a prima facie (pharma facie?) negative valence of academic-industrial connections; I was struck to hear, however, one of the panelists (an academic) on a recent panel discussion on translational medicine open with a slow and measured statement affirming her belief that collaborations between academics and industry can be a “good thing.” She then paused, as if to let the shock of the statement permeate the audience.