Why Can’t Smart People Get Conflict Of Interest?
By
Leonard Zwelling
The New York Times just dropped this story about additional free trips by Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas on Harlan Crow’s airplane. These trips were from Hawaii to New Zealand. Sounds like fun.
Mister Justice Thomas seems to have no concept of why taking lavish free gifts from private citizens who might have business before the Court (and you never know who will in advance) is a bad idea. He also seems to have no idea why it is a bad idea not to recuse himself on matters concerning the January 6,2021 storming of the Capitol when his wife was instrumental in advocating for this display of insurrection.
Let’s see if we can make this easy.
If you are in a position to make a decision that involves someone with whom you have a personal, financial, or political relationship, recuse yourself.
Recently, I have been involved with such discussions in the non-profit sector where board members feel it is OK to involve people who are requesting to be on the board in the voting on their own appointment to that board. That is a clear conflict, but that doesn’t stop the behavior.
Money also can be involved. I used to tell members of the MD Anderson faculty not to take money from a drug company if they could make a boat payment with the money. Did that stop anyone? No. Doctors who were evaluating the safety and efficacy of novel drugs developed by big pharma were accepting money from the very companies for whom they were running clinical trials. Would you trust the reporting of fabulous clinical results from such doctors? Me, neither.
There was a time in my life when not only me, but also the BW took no money from pharma because of my position of signing all the clinical contracts with drug companies. We even went so far as to sell all of our drug stock, some of which the BW had inherited from her father. No matter. We could not allow ourselves to be in any conflict or even perceived conflict by owning shares in a company with which I might have to sign a contract.
Leaders in academic institutions have to be very careful. John Mendelsohn was on the board of Enron when the company collapsed. Enron was a contributor to MD Anderson. Clearly the president of MD Anderson should not be on the board of a company donating to the cancer center. What if the Enron board had to take up the question of donating more money to MD Anderson.
Furthermore. Dr. Mendelsohn had a deep interest in ImClone, a company that developed the drug he invented which was being tested at Anderson. That’s a conflict, too.
In the end, it is difficult for a clinical investigator or a board member to have two masters. You have to pick one. When I was on the board of Legacy Community Health, I stepped down as soon as I became an employee. I could not be both a board member and the chief medical officer whose work is overseen by the board.
Conflicts are everywhere these days. One has to be very careful when accepting money that there is no conflict. Money for research is one thing. Money for boat payments yet another.
Justice Thomas, for a supposedly smart guy, behaves like a teenager. So does his wife. Congress does need to develop guidelines for the behavior of the Supreme Court members. The credibility of the Court has been greatly harmed already. This just makes it worse.
I have personally seen how such behavior can be toxic to an organization. It can be true for a cancer center. It can be true for the Supreme Court.
There is no managing conflicts of interest. There is only their elimination.
