Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street

by Sheelah Kolhatkar

He made it a point never to invest in pharmaceutical stocks, as he worried about potential conflicts of interest. But he soon found himself prioritizing his consulting work over other things he used to do, such as serving on advisory panels and authoring articles that paid little or nothing. He wasn’t the only one. Many of his friends and colleagues were doing it, too. In fact, the medical profession was being infiltrated by Wall Street, as more and more physicians were drawn into the web of high finance as paid sources for money managers. In 2005, Journal of the American Medical Association published a study finding that almost 10 percent of the doctors in the United States had paid ties to Wall Street investors, an increase of 750 percent since 1996. The unofficial number was probably much higher. The rapid coopting of the medical profession, according to the article, was “likely unprecedented in the history of professional-professional relationships.”