Science's Hedge Fund Problem

The New England Journal of Medicine and other journals may soon require that researchers tell editors of any payments they've received from hedge funds before their work is published, says Bloomberg News' Alex Nussbaum. Existing rules on disclosing payments from drug and device companies don't cover investor money, Nussbaum says, and editors from NEJM, JAMA, and 12 others are getting together in June to talk about how to rectify this omission. The issue surfaced in November when French researcher Yves Benhamou leaked information about a drug study being conducted by Human Genome Sciences — the company he was advising at the time — to a hedge fund investing in the company, Nussbaum says.