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How Corporate Health Care Leaders Maintain Their Impunity: The Case of Purdue Pharma's Funding of the Washington Legal Foundation to Attempt to Weaken the Responsible Corporate Officer Doctrine

The ongoing epidemic of narcotic (opioid) abuse, and the resulting rise in the deaths due to overdoses, has focused attention on pharmaceutical companies' aggressive promotion of these drugs which minimized their substantial risk. A recent article in the Intercept showed how the leadership of one such company tried to insulate itself from responsibility for such actions even while such promotions were continuing. Background: Impunity of Top Leaders of Big Health Care Organizations For years, we have railed against the impunity of top leaders of health care organizations.  We have noted that despite numerous legal settlements made by health care organizations of alllegations like fraud , bribery , and kickbacks , almost never do top leaders who presided over these actions face any negative consequences.  Lack of deterrence caused by such impunity appears to be a major cause of  the epidemic of continuing unethical behavior, crime and corruption on the part of large health car
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The Genetics of Obesity, Part II

Rodents Lead the Way

The study of obesity genetics dates back more than half a century. In 1949, researchers at the Jackson Laboratories identified a remarkably fat mouse, which they determined carried a spontaneous mutation in an unidentified gene. They named this the "obese" (ob/ob) mouse. Over the next few decades, researchers identified several other genetically obese mice with spontaneous mutations, including diabetic (db/db) mice, "agouti" (Avy) mice, and "Zucker" (fa/fa) rats.

At the time of discovery, no one knew where the mutations resided in the genome. All they knew is that the mutations were in single genes, and they resulted in extreme obesity. Researchers recognized this as a huge opportunity to learn something important about the regulation of body fatness in an unbiased way. Unbiased because these mutations could be identified with no prior knowledge about their function, therefore the investigators' pre-existing beliefs about the mechanisms of body fat regulation could have no impact on what they learned. Many different research groups tried to pin down the underlying source of dysfunction: some thought it was elevated insulin and changes in adipose tissue metabolism, others thought it was elevated cortisol, and a variety of other hypotheses.

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