The Trouble at M.D. Anderson

After belatedly reading my colleague Paul Raeburn’s scathing appraisal of the Time magazine story on cancer, I’m thinking I was too generous in my previous post. I wrote that if you could forget for a moment the reckless magazine cover -- with its blaring headline “How to Cure Cancer” -- that the article itself was reasonably well done. Raeburn makes some good criticisms and, it turns out, there is an even larger issue. I had read the Time story online and not in the paper edition, and it is disturbing to learn that there is a full-page advertisement for the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center placed among the pages of the article. Even worse, Raeburn writes in a follow-up post, "the language in the ad is almost identical to some of the language in the story." Anderson has had a wave of bad publicity under its recently appointed president, Ronald DePinho, and his wife, Lynda Chin, over conflicts of interest and a managerial style that has led to resignations of top researchers. And Dr. DePinho’s “moon shots” program and the way it was played up last year on CNN has been called the worst kind of cancer hype. For a biting critique see Gary Schwitzer’s report in HealthNewsReview.org. Since then morale at Anderson has apparently gotten worse. Just as Time’s cover story appeared last week, The Cancer Letter published a special issue about the low morale at Anderson, as described in a 64-page internal report. (Both can be downloaded at The Cancer Letter’swebsite.) Related posts:On Dwarves, James Watson, and the Oddities of CancerM.D. Anderson's Chief Entrepreneur