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Being a professional fundraiser for a major university, and working with
corporations who support research, I get really incensed when I see
people make statements or repeat stories with such little merit! Do you
honestly believe that a university like Harvard could be paid by a
corporation to prepare research that is untruthful? Further....drug the
researcher who protests? Universities hold extremely high ethics and
standards for the research that they publish.

> I no longer trust health care professionals until they have proven
> themselves.  A recent article in the New York Times reported that the
> American Dieticians Association (might have the name wrong)has been
> accepting large donations from major corporations like Coca Cola and
> McDonalds in return for the association's endorsement of the corporate
> product as being part of a balanced diet or some such BS.

Can you please tell the date of this article? I find this hard to believe, I
think you are misinterpretating this story.

> An acquaintance of mine introduced me to an ethnobiologist who told me
> how the department heads of major universities (He mentioned  Harvard
> in particular) would sell their professional credentials to the highest
> bidder. Corporate sponsers  would approach the university with the
> proposition that they fund a chair in
> exchange for the university "proving" something to be true.  For example,
> instead of the university studying how  eating  fast food burgers affected
> health, they would set out to prove that fast food burgers did not adversely
> affect health and indeed might even enhance it.  There is a profound
> philisophical difference in the two approaches.  Anything can be proved as
> long as one is will to ignore evidence.  My friend went on to say that if
> you were a researcher and protested on ethical grounds, your career would be
> finished.  If you persisted and threatened to go public, somebody would
> synthesize a chemical in the lab and "slip it to you." You would then be
> carted off to the funny farm never to be heard from again.
>
> The next day I
> noticed  an AP article in our local paper about a Chinese reasearcher who
> worked for a major government lab who was charging that her department head
> slipped a radioactive isotope in her coffee to kill her unborn child.
> Apparrently she was doing some advanced genetic research and could not keep
> up the 15 hour days because of her pregnancy.  Her department head told her
> the research was too important (He wanted to patent the technique) and that
> she would have to get an abortion.  She refused.  There is plenty of
> evidence to back her claim and the  government is prosecuting the case.
> Imagine how this woman must feel after escaping from Red China to come to
> the United States to have a child and then having  a doctor try to kill her
> baby?

I saw this story on Dateline-TV.  There is no evidence saying who is
responsible for the poisoning.  The research center is investigating who
is responsible, and is in no way stating who is responsible. Lastly, the
government is involved in the investigation, and is not "prosecuting the
case."

I'm sorry if this letter sounds so cross, but I think people on this
listserv should stick to goal of discussing and sharing helpful
information about celiac disease.  There is no reason to get people
paranoid about research, when so many universities are so diligently
doing research to help stop/cure diseases.

Lauren Smith Brown
Assistant Director of Corporate Development
MIT
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