Tuesday, October 04, 2011

Something smells off with this - grant to fund travel to meeting, if you use Roche technologies

Just got this email from Roche announcing a grant program to pay registration and travel fees for the AGBT meeting if you are using Roche-454 sequencing or Roche-Nimblegen arrays as part of your work (see below).  Seems like this would have some of the same conflict of interest issues as a pharma company paying someone to give a talk.  I note - I participated in a session supported by 454 at a meeting but paid my own way to avoid this type of conflict of interest issue.  Anyone have opinions on this?  Is this a common pharma method creeping its way more and more into genomics?



1 comment:

  1. Interesting post - I hadn't considered being sponsored by the makers of a piece of equipment you use to be much of a conflict of interest (although admittedly I am newish to the world of scientific conferences). I can see it being a problem if your abstract is basically "Roche equipment is amazing" but do you think it is also a problem if the abstract is "using roche equipment we found..." ?

    If you did receive the grant isn't it normal practice to write this on your poster/say it in your presentation? That would point out any possible conflict of interest to your audience. Or do you think that is not enough?

    ReplyDelete

Most recent post

Panoramas from the past ...

In 1997, my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went camping in Death Valley. It was our fourth trip there to camp in grad. school. I brought m...