"In one telling example, Dr. Nemeroff signed a letter dated July 15, 2004, promising Emory administrators that he would earn less than $10,000 a year from GlaxoSmithKline to comply with federal rules. But on that day, he was at the Four Seasons Resort in Jackson Hole, Wyo., earning $3,000 of what would become $170,000 in income that year from that company” 17 times the figure he had agreed on.

"The Congressional inquiry, led by Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, is systematically asking some of the nation's leading researchers to provide their conflict-of-interest disclosures, and Mr. Grassley is comparing those documents with records of actual payments from drug companies. The records often conflict, sometimes starkly.

" 'After questioning about 20 doctors and research institutions, it looks like problems with transparency are everywhere,' Mr. Grassley said. "he current system for tracking financial relationships isn't working."

"The findings suggest that universities are all but incapable of policing their faculty's conflicts of interest. Almost every major medical school and medical society is now reassessing its relationships with drug and device makers.

" 'Everyone is concerned,' said Dr. James H. Scully Jr., the president-elect of the Council of Medical Specialty Societies, whose 30 members represent more than 500,000 doctors.

"Mr. Grassley began his investigation in the spring by questioning Dr. Melissa P. DelBello of the University of Cincinnati after The New York Times reported her connections to drug makers. Dr. DelBello told university officials that she earned about $100,000 from 2005 to 2007 from eight drug makers, but AstraZeneca alone paid her $238,000 during the period, Mr. Grassley found.

"Then in early June, the senator reported to Congress that Dr. Joseph Biederman, a renowned child psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, and a colleague, Dr. Timothy E. Wilens, had reported to university officials earning several hundred thousand dollars each in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007, when in fact they had earned at least $1.6 million each.

"Then the senator focused on Dr. Alan F. Schatzberg of Stanford, president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association, whose $4.8 million in stock holdings in a drug development company raised concerns.

"Mr. Grassley has sponsored legislation called the Physician Payment Sunshine Act, which would require drug and device companies to publicly list payments to doctors that exceed $500. Several states already require such disclosures.

"In 2004, Emory investigated Dr. Nemeroff's outside consulting arrangements. In a 14-page report, Emory's conflict of interest committee detailed multiple "serious" and "significant" violations of university procedures intended to protect patients.

"But the university apparently took little action against Dr. Nemeroff and made no effort to independently audit his consulting income, documents show.

"Universities, too, can benefit from the fame and money the deals can bring” a point Dr. Nemeroff made in a May 2000 letter stamped "confidential" that he sent to the dean of Emory's medical school. The letter, which was part of a record from a Congressional hearing, addressed Dr. Nemeroff's membership on a dozen corporate advisory boards (some of the companies' names have since changed).

" 'Surely you remember that Smith-Kline Beecham Pharmaceuticals donated an endowed chair to the department and that there is some reasonable likelihood that Janssen Pharmaceuticals will do so as well,' he wrote.

"Universities once looked askance at professors who consulted for more than one or two drug companies, but that changed after a 1980 law gave the universities ownership of patents discovered with federal money.

"The law helped give birth to the biotechnology industry and led to the discovery of dozens of life-saving medicines. Consulting arrangements soon proliferated at medical schools, and Dr. Nemeroff ” who at one point consulted for 21 drug and device companies simultaneously” became a national model.

"He may now become a model for a broad reassessment of industry relationships. Many medical schools, societies and groups are considering barring doctors from giving lectures on drug or device marketing.

"For all his fame in the world of psychiatry, Dr. Nemeroff has faced ethics troubles before. In 2006, he blamed a clerical mix-up for his failing to disclose that he and his co-authors had financial ties to Cyberonics, the maker of a controversial device that they reviewed favorably in a journal he edited.

"The Cyberonics paper led to a bitter e-mail exchange between Dr. Nemeroff and Claudia R. Adkison, an associate dean at Emory, according to Congressional records. Dr. Adkison noted that Cyberonics had not only paid Dr. Nemeroff and his co-authors but had also given an unrestricted educational grant to Dr. Nemeroff's department.

" 'I can't believe that anyone in the public or in academia would believe anything except that this paper was a piece of paid marketing,' Dr. Adkison wrote on July 20, 2006."

Especially now that the Bush-McSame GOP regime's "blue sky" anything goes for profit, self-regulation and deregulation of financial systems have been shown to have aided and abetted the financial system debacle, physicians' self-regulation has been a failure and regulations must be put in place to keep doctors and drug companies "honest."  "Physician heal thyself" is a philosophical warning that no longer works, particularly during Republican administrations.