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108 Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries
status of medical research unless a mood arises to combat overzealous
bureaucratic authority.
Dr. Walter Modell of Cornell University Medical College finally warned
in a published article ("FDA Censorship" in Clinical Pharmacology and
Therapeutics):
When the nonexpert in-group of the FDA threatens to become the dictator
of American medicine we believe it will lead medicine from its
respected eminence to its ultimate decline.
A few years after the DMSO suppression, one of Goddard's top aides,
Billy Goodrich, left the FDA with his pension and became president of a
food association regulated by the FDA. A personal friend who had been
president of the food association took over Billy Goodrich's position at
the FDA. They simply switched jobs! Congressmen screamed in protest.
It was such a blatant demonstration of the "musical shuffle" (which
Congress had previously observed but ignored) that they had to make
some noise this time in order to avert public wrath. Still after all the sound
and fury, nothing happened.
Goddard himself became Chairman of the Board of Ormont Drug and
Chemical Company a few years after leaving the FDA.
A study conducted by the U.S. Congress in 1969 revealed that 37 of 49
top officials of the FDA who left the agency moved into high corporate
positions with the large companies they had regulated. A General
Accounting Office (GAO) study of the FDA in 1975 revealed that 150
FDA officials owned stock in the companies they were supposed to regulate.
The record of "conflict of interest" (or worse) within the FDA is deep
and extensive.
In 1976, Dr. J. Richard Crout of the FDA admitted that "endless questions"
was a favored technique within the agency to discourage any researcher
who sought approval for an unorthodox cancer therapy.
Bureaucratic obstruction is a weapon as deadly as a gun when the lives of
innocent millions are at stake. It is a delusion to consider such institutionalized,
orchestrated conduct, consciously chosen either because of orders
from above or personal inclination, as anything other than white collar
murder. In fact, it closely resembles the role carried out by the bureaucrats
who pushed the paper in Nazi Germany. The policy-makers may not fully
perceive the effect of their actions, but the horror has gone on for too
many decades to allow a plea of ignorance to be totally convincing.
In 1972, Dean Burk, Ph.D., of the National Cancer Institute (head of
their cytochemistry section and a veteran of thirty-two years at the agency)
declared in a letter to a member of Congress that high official of the FDA,