Pfizer Worker Photographed Protesters at Harvard
Duff Wilson
March 2, 2009

Harvard Medical School’s rules say that students on campus are supposed to be off-limits to drug company representatives.

That is why David Tian, a first-year Harvard medical student, said he found it “strange and off-putting” last fall when a man who identified himself as a Pfizer employee took a cellphone photo of students as they demonstrated against pharmaceutical industry influence on campus. “We could only assume he intended to share this with his company,” Mr. Tian said.

The students did not get the man’s name, but they took his picture.

Asked about the mysterious Pfizer man on campus and shown his picture, a company spokesman said he had recently contacted the employee and concluded that he had done nothing wrong. Declining to name him, the spokesman, Ray Kerins, said the employee had photographed the students for personal use.

Mr. Kerins preferred to talk about Pfizer’s support of the medical school, which, according to Harvard officials, includes private payments to at least 149 faculty members, corporate donations of $350,000 to the school last year, $234,000 for continuing medical education classes, and two Pfizer-financed research projects on campus.

“We’ve got top-class collaboration in place with leading medical institutions around the world, and we’re very proud of them,” Mr. Kerins said.

Whatever the unidentified Pfizer representative was up to, Mr. Tian and other students said they saw him again two weeks after the campus protest, at a public lecture on campus about conflicts of interest in medical research.

Drug industry employees are “all over the place,” the lecturer, Dr. Catherine D. DeAngelis, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, said last week. “It’s a free country,” she said. “I’m not hiding anything. Maybe they’ll even listen to what I say and think about what they’re doing.”