JAMA Editor Catherine DeAngelis Is Leaving
6 CommentsBy Ed Silverman // September 1st, 2010 // 12:57 pm
After a decade of running one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, Catherine DeAngelis is leaving her job as editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association next year to join Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, where she will develop a Center for Professionalism in Medicine and the Related Professions, including nursing, public health, business and law.
“This program, based in ethical professional conduct, will be a culmination of education, training and experience. It is the logical next step for me based back in my academic home,” DeAngelis says in a statement, which notes she was vice dean for Academic Affairs and Faculty at Hopkins School of Medicine before going to JAMA and is a professor of pediatrics there.
During her tenure at JAMA, DeAngelis was one of the more outspoken medical journal editors to address several controversies roiling the pharmaceutical industry, including ghostwriting (see here), the need to register clinical trials prior to publication, conflicts of interests involving study authors and the failure of some drugmakers to sufficiently make clinical trial data available to academic researchers (look at this).
UPDATE: At the same time, DeAngelis has not always taken the high road. Last year, for instance, the Wall Street Journal noted Health blog noted that she came off as thin skinned when she took umbrage at criticism from a researcher over an omission and undisclosed conflict of interest in a paper published in JAMA. How so? She called the researcher a “nobody and a nothing.”
DeAngelis has also rubbed some journalists the wrong way by blacklisting them for allegedly breaking embargoes. One episode - a Detroit Free Press reporter ran afoul of DeAngelis for reporting about the Women’s Health Initiative study on breast cancer in 2002, despite doing her own legwork in advance of the official publication. Ironically, the journalist says DeAngelis was selective about disclosure - she told her own siblings not to use HRT’s. There was also a dust-up involving a sister JAMA publication in which undisclosed financial conflicts involving an author were not addressed (read here and here).
As for a replacement, a search is under way.
pharmavet
Replace De Angelis with anyone but JAMA Deputy Editor Drummond Rennie. Rennie is an anti-pharma bloviator who wraps himself in a holier-than-thou cloak of an “ethicist”. At least De Angelis did her homework. Rennie is a washed up hack who gets off on hurling invective, likes to get personal and takes no prisoners. At least he’s where he belongs, at the epicenter of anti-pharma sentiment, The University of California San Francisco.
Epic
Pharmavet, your screed reads like a favorably endorsement of Dr. Rennie. Hope he gets the job.
pharmavet
Epic, if Rennie becomes editor of JAMA, and you submit a publication, make sure that you state every source of funding right down to whomever paid for your Boy Scout merit badges. People on this site are familiar with my academic credentials. What are yours, pray tell?
Bernard Carroll
Interesting Freudian slip - skin thinned, Ed. It suggests Dr. DeAngelis got into a lot of scrapes. I lost respect for her when she told me I was treating the Letters to Editor section of a sister journal as my own personal complaints department. I had to let her know that this imperious attitude did not become her or her position. Journal editors are supposed to let the scientific chips fall where they may, and if that means being shown up for publishing low quality stuff in Arcchives of General Psychiatry then so be it. Talk about thin skinned! As far as I am concerned, the sooner she is replaced the better.
Ed Silverman
Hi Bernard,
Well, looks like I got my twords wisted. But I made the fix. Thanks for pointing that out.
Regards,
ed
Marge Simpson
Catherine DeAngelis going to the JH “Center for Professionalism”? Reminds me of Maude Flanders going to bible camp to be more judgmental.