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The next thing Firestein did was google Martin Keller, the lead author of the Paxil study. What she found shocked her to her core. Up popped the series of articles published a few years back in the Boston Globe that essentially cast doubt on Keller’s integrity as a scientist. As a doctor’s daughter, Firestein had up to this point pretty much believed in the purity of science, the tenet that its practitioners were honorable scholars laboring away in the isolation of their ivy-covered labs, impervious to the siren song of big money. But here was the chief of psychiatry at Brown essentially accused in the pages of a respected newspaper of being beholden to the drug industry. And that was not all. Firestein found an earlier article in the same newspaper charging Keller’s department with falsifying invoices to obtain money from a financially strapped state agency for research that didn’t appear to have happened. Still another clip noted that Brown had repaid the Commonwealth of Massachusetts more than $300,000 for the contract dollars that Keller’s department had obtained under these dubious circumstances. “When I read the pieces about Keller, it made me look at psychiatry in a whole different light, with new cynicism,” Firestein later acknowledged. “I had not realized the depth of the connection between academic researchers and the pharmaceutical industry.
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Alison Bass (Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower, and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial)