The Real Story is How She Didn't Get Killed
Ok maybe that is overstatement. But taking on a company as big as Astra Zeneca with an accusation like this one reported in Forbes is, um, dangerous:A Georgetown University doctor is alleging that an education firm working with drug giant AstraZeneca tried to ghostwrite an article in a medical journal.It is, whether true in this case, a practice that is rapidly becoming commonplace. Or at least that is what our ghostwriters told us to say.Adriane Fugh-Berman, an associate professor of alternative medicine at Georgetown, charges that she was approached by a medical education firm, Mold, United Kingdom-based Rx Communications, to write an article on the potential of medicinal herbs and dietary supplements to interact with a commonly used blood thinner, Coumadin.
"They sent me a completed manuscript with my name on it," Fugh-Berman says, "and I hadn't actually agreed to write anything."
At the time, AstraZeneca (nyse: AZN - news - people ) was developing its own experimental blood thinner, Exanta. The drug was eventually rejected by the U.S. Food and Drug Association. But Coumadin's capacity to interact with everything from spinach to supplements was expected to be a major selling point for the new drug. Later, Fugh-Berman says, she was asked to review a paper for a medical journal, and it was the same ghostwritten paper she had previously been offered to pass off as her own.
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