Kidney exchange in Brazil, continued (with pictures)

 In August I posted about a trip to Brazil with Mike Rees where we traveled with Dr. Gustavo Ferreira, the director of transplantation at the hospital Santa Casa de Misericórdia de Juiz de Fora

Part of our trip was spent in the capital, Brasilia, talking to the government about extending Brazilian transplant law to allow kidney exchange, after which we went to Juiz de Fora.  Here's my blog post about that trip:  Kidney exchange in Brazil: prelude. 

That post concluded by saying "On Saturday we had an exciting finish to the trip, but it's not my story to tell yet, so I'll blog again after there is an official announcement."

Now Brazil's first three-way kidney exchange has been announced, as part of a clinical trial that I hope will help change Brazilian law to allow kidney exchange as a regular medical procedure.  The three donors and three recipients all did well, and left the hospital very shortly after the actual surgeries, but came back to tell their stories to the Brazilian news show Profissão Repórter (Professional Reporter). You can see the video here  https://globoplay.globo.com/v/12997336/

It's in Portuguese but you will quickly get the idea, presented even more briefly on Instagram by the transplant nephrologist Dr. Juliana Bastos here: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DA4JBVIsFta/?igsh=d2hnb3hoNjJxN2I4     where you can see the three incompatible patient-donor pairs rearrange themselves for the camera into the three-way exchange in which each patient received an organ from a compatible donor. (Dr. Bastos recently added a PhD to her MD, with a dissertation on kidney exchange.)

Here's another Instagram link to the video.

I had the privilege of observing parts of five of the six surgeries (three nephrectomies and three transplants), and some pictures are below.  

If someone directs a movie about this kind of transplant surgery, there will be two dramatic scenes, one in which the donated kidney is carried across the hall to the transplant operating room, and the second showing the moment the clamps are removed from the blood vessels of the transplanted kidney, so that it turns from grey to pink as blood returns to it. 

But here's a photo I took at  the start of what I think is the most dramatic moment of the surgery, as the artery from the kidney is just about to be connected to the artery of the recipient.

The artery from the donated kidney is the small white tube being pointed to by the instrument held in the fingers at the top right of the picture. Immediately in front of it--the long red tube--is the artery of the recipient, to which it must be connected so that blood can again flow to the kidney.  Notice that a small incision has already been made in the recipient's artery--this is where the two will be attached. The connection has to be perfect, so that the blood can flow without obstruction that could cause a clot.

The surgeon who first figured out how to do this kind of vascular surgery, Dr. Alexis Carrel, won the 1912 The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

I was able to follow the proceedings thanks to the running commentary offered to me by the Brazilian surgeons and by Mike Rees (who wasn't busy doing surgery). That wasn't the only kind of support Mike offered me in the OR (as I balanced on a pair of stools to better appreciate the commentary):

And here's a post-op picture of most of the big team that made it happen:

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Parabéns ao Gustavo e à Juliana! Congratulations. Your work and leadership can make a big difference not just to your patients, but to people all over Brazil.

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Earlier:

Monday, August 12, 2024

Kidney exchange in Brazil: prelude

IV fluid shortages in the U.S.--perhaps we should allow international imports?

There's a hurricane-induced shortage of intravenous (IV) fluid.  Maybe we should import some? (But...international borders...)

An obstacle is that FDA approval of the factories is usually needed, but can be (and in the past has been) suspended, to allow imports from places that do their own high quality inspection (like Australia and Ireland in 2017--I guess it's good that the labels are in English) .  

More generally, after the Covid pandemic we learned of the fragility of supply chains that have concentrated overseas sources (like surgical masks from Wuhan).  The reaction has been to onshore more production. But concentrated domestic production also makes for fragile supply chains, and being able to diversify to overseas producers could strengthen them.

Statnews has the story:

White House should declare national emergency over IV fluid shortages caused by Helene, says hospital group. Hurricane Helene shuttered a Baxter plant that manufactures 60% of IV solutions for the U.S.  By Brittany Trang 

"Amid Hurricane Helene shuttering a major IV solution manufacturing plant and Hurricane Milton now barreling toward other IV manufacturing facilities in central Florida, the American Hospital Association on Monday asked the Biden administration to declare a shortage of IV solutions and invoke national emergency powers to ease the crisis. 

'In late September, Hurricane Helene shut down a Baxter plant in Marion, N. C., which manufactures approximately 60% of the IV solutions for the U.S. Both Baxter and “all other suppliers” of IV solutions have restricted how much their customers can order and have stopped taking new customers, AHA president Rick Pollack wrote in the organization’s letter to Biden. As a result, hospitals have declared internal shortages and restricted IV use. 

...

"In addition, the letter asked for the government to declare a national emergency and public health emergency so that Medicare and Medicaid rules around IV infusions can become more flexible, and to invoke the Defense Production Act to expand the production of IV solutions and bags. The AHA also suggested the government put the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice on alert for price gouging during the shortage.

Another step the FDA could take is to allow the importation of IV bags from other countries,* as it did when Hurricane Maria shut down Baxter’s Puerto Rico-based IV saline plants in 2017. That shortage mostly affected small IV bags. According to Vizient, a health care performance improvement company, the North Carolina Baxter plant is largely a producer of large IV bags, including saline, dextrose, and Ringer’s lactate solutions.

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*In 2017: "To address a shortage of intravenous solution bags exacerbated by Hurricane Maria, the Food and Drug Administration has granted permission for a health supply company to import certain products to the United States from Australia and Ireland."

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Related:

Wednesday, August 28, 2024

WHO Says Countries Should Be Self-Sufficient In (Unremunerated) Organs And Blood, by Krawiec and Roth

An own-goal in replication science--retraction of a paper that reported high replicability

  A 2023 paper reporting high replicability of psychology experiments has been retracted from Nature Human Behavior. The retraction notice says in part 
"The concerns relate to lack of transparency and misstatement of the hypotheses and predictions the reported meta-study was designed to test; lack of preregistration for measures and analyses supporting the titular claim (against statements asserting preregistration in the published article); selection of outcome measures and analyses with knowledge of the data; and incomplete reporting of data and analyses."

RETRACTED ARTICLE: High replicability of newly discovered social-behavioural findings is achievable

• John Protzko, 
• Jon Krosnick, 
• Leif Nelson, 
• Brian A. Nosek, 
• Jordan Axt, 
• Matt Berent, 
• Nicholas Buttrick, 
• Matthew DeBell, 
• Charles R. Ebersole, 
• Sebastian Lundmark, 
• Bo MacInnis, 
• Michael O’Donnell, 
• Hannah Perfecto, 
• James E. Pustejovsky, 
• Scott S. Roeder, 
• Jan Walleczek & 
• Jonathan W. Schooler 

Nature Human Behaviour volume 8, pages311–319 (2024)Cite this article

• 47k Accesses

• 470 Altmetric

• Metricsdetails

This article was retracted on 24 September 2024

Matters Arising to this article was published on 24 September 2024

This article has been updated

Abstract

Failures to replicate evidence of new discoveries have forced scientists to ask whether this unreliability is due to suboptimal implementation of methods or whether presumptively optimal methods are not, in fact, optimal. This paper reports an investigation by four coordinated laboratories of the prospective replicability of 16 novel experimental findings using rigour-enhancing practices: confirmatory tests, large sample sizes, preregistration and methodological transparency. In contrast to past systematic replication efforts that reported replication rates averaging 50%, replication attempts here produced the expected effects with significance testing (P < 0.05) in 86% of attempts, slightly exceeding the maximum expected replicability based on observed effect sizes and sample sizes. When one lab attempted to replicate an effect discovered by another lab, the effect size in the replications was 97% that in the original study. This high replication rate justifies confidence in rigour-enhancing methods to increase the replicability of new discoveries.

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In general, I'm more optimistic about replications than preregistrations for identifying replicable results and testing hypotheses about them.  In this case, preregistration apparently revealed that what was written up as a replication study had begun as something else, and that the goal posts had been moved ex post, apparently in inappropriate ways.

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Somewhat related are my posts on the Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research.

October 7, 2023

 There aren't enough days in the year to remember all of important history by naming a day, but some days stand out. The oldest one I know is the 9th day of the month of Av in the Jewish calendar, Tisha b'Av. 

But October 7 is likely to be remembered for a long time, an unimaginable day whose dire consequences are still unfolding.

The Genesis Prize Foundation remembers the first anniversary with these videos:

"This week we mark a full year since October 7 when Hamas murdered 1,200 innocent people in Israel and dragged over 200 hostages into Gaza. And while media attention has shifted to Iran and Lebanon, it is important that the world not forget that over 100 hostages still remain in captivity in unbearable conditions in Gaza. "Our foundation will not stop speaking out until they are all home. "As we all struggle with how to cope with this unimaginable reality, one thing we can do is continue to share the stories of those directly impacted, and keep the plight of the hostages top of mind for communities around the world. "Please watch and share these documentaries about October 7.

 

Screams Before Silence Sheryl Sandberg https://youtu.be/zAr9oGSXgak?feature=shared

Coming to Kill You Israel News 13https://youtu.be/dd-86D__zSk?feature=shared

 

October 7th, 2023 Dan Gordon https://www.tbn.org/programs/october-7th-2023

Facts – October 7 War Izzy Stream https://www.streamisrael.tv/facts

 

"May the new year bring peace, health, and the return of our stolen loved ones. Shana Tova to you and your families. "The Genesis Prize Foundation"

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This from The Telegraph:

‘Not one girl could be shown to her parents’: The horrors of Oct 7 – as told by the survivors

In a heartbreaking dispatch to mark the anniversary, witnesses recall the heroism of victims and the true depravity of the attack.  by Allison Pearson  

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The New Yorker has this story:

A Year After October 7th, a Kibbutz Survives. In Be’eri, where more than a hundred people were killed and thirty taken captive, former residents are attempting to rebuild. By Ruth Margalit  October 6, 2024

In the same issue is this poem by the Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha about deaths there:

Under the Rubble

Published in the print edition of the October 7, 2024, issue.

Technology and crime: cloning giant sheep

 There are things you can go to prison for that wouldn't have been possible to do not long ago.

The Washington Post is on the case:

Rancher sentenced to 6 months in prison for illegally cloning giant sheep. Arthur “Jack” Schubarth, 81, previously pleaded guilty to creating giant hybrid sheep via illegally imported genetic material.  By Kyle Melnick

"The Montana rancher’s illegal scheme began in 2012, when he paid for his son to hunt one of the world’s largest sheep species in Kyrgyzstan, court documents say. Arthur “Jack” Schubarth then used parts of the sheep in the following years to breed an even larger hybrid species and sell those animals to hunters.

"Now, Schubarth is set to spend six months in prison for the ploy after pleading guilty to two felony wildlife counts in March. Both counts stemmed from violations of the Lacey Act, a federal conservation law that prohibits interstate sales of falsely labeled animals and sales of animals to states where they’re illegal to own.

...

"Much of the scheme played out at Schubarth’s 215-acre ranch in Vaughn, Mont., where he bred and sold mountain sheep, mountain goats and similar breeds. Schubarth paid for his son to take multiple trips to Kyrgyzstan in 2012 and 2013. In January 2013, Schubarth’s son brought back viable tissue from a Marco Polo argali, a rare and large species native to central Asia, but didn’t declare the materials when he reentered the United States, court documents allege.

...

"Schubarth sought to create an even more valuable species, according to prosecutors. Sheep with larger horns and bodies are worth more to hunters, including at private shooting preserves, where hunters pay to pursue captive game.

...

"Schubarth agreed to a contract with a cloning facility in 2015, and by late the following year, he had 165 cloned embryos of Marco Polo argali. He implanted embryos in his ewes and in May 2017 bred a male argali, who he named Montana Mountain King.

"In the following years, Schubarth bred Montana Mountain King’s semen with other ewe species, creating more hybrid sheep that he sold to captive hunting facilities, mainly in Texas. To do so, he bought Rocky Mountain bighorn sheeps’ testicles, despite Montana prohibiting trade of game animals."

The NAS proposes that bans on studying marijuana and its effects should be relaxed

 The National Academy of Sciences has just issued a new report on marijuana and public health.  Among their recommendations is that bans on research should be rescinded. (Because marijuana is currently a Schedule I drug in the Controlled Substances Act, it's hard to get permission to study it and its effects...)

Cannabis Policy Impacts Public Health and Health Equity (2024)

Nondirected liver donation in Canada--from the beginning

The Ottawa Citizen has the story:

The Gosling Effect: How one man (and his liver) forever changed Canadian health care. In 2005, Kevin Gosling became the first living Canadian to anonymously donate an organ to a stranger. It set a cascade of kindness into motion.  by Elizabeth Payne 

"It had been a long road for the then-46-year-old from Cornwall, Ont. For months, health officials wouldn’t take him seriously when he offered to donate the organ anonymously. We don’t do that here, he was told. Not only that, it had never been done before anywhere in Canada.

"Some top officials in Canada’s leading liver transplant program were adamantly opposed to Gosling’s proposal. They said it was unethical and immoral. They questioned his motives, even his sanity. But Gosling persisted, so far as to undergo months of physical and psychological testing and preparation.

"After more than a year and a half, everything was set to go.

...

"Gosling didn’t know much about the recipient. He only knew that it was a child.

...

"Gosling’s stubborn altruism and unwavering belief that he could make a life-changing difference to someone in desperate need almost single-handedly changed Canada’s health-care system.

"In the 19 years since that fateful day when transplant surgeons removed part of Gosling’s liver and transplanted it into the body of the very ill child, the Toronto General Hospital has completed more than 137 such operations involving people donating anonymously to strangers – more than any other hospital in the world.

...

"He was a pioneer in an area in which Canada is now a world leader – the act of anonymously donating part of a liver – a phenomenon that continues to be met with disbelief in some parts of the world.

...

"Gosling’s offer was turned down multiple times until he was eventually put in touch with the head of the multi-organ transplant program at University Health Network, one of only two hospitals in the country where living liver transplants are now routinely done. Along the way he met health officials who were adamantly opposed to the idea, even citing the Hippocratic oath. (Later, he was told by one staunch opponent that following Gosling’s case had made him change his mind.)"

HT: Colin Rowat

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See also:

Cattral, Mark S., Anand Ghanekar, and Nazia Selzner. "Anonymous living donor liver transplantation: The altruistic strangers." Gastroenterology 165, no. 6 (2023): 1315-1317.

and here are all my posts on nondirected donors: https://marketdesigner.blogspot.com/search/label/nondirected%20donor

A bride- price auction: “the most expensive bride in South Sudan”

 The Guardian has the story of a bride-price auction for a child bride in South Sudan:

A teenage bride wed for a record price: the ‘marriage competition’ that divided a nation   Underage marriage is illegal in South Sudan yet so commonplace it rarely attracts attention. But the case of Athiak Dau Riak, who her mother says is only 14, has gone viral, polarising her family and the country.  by Florence Miettaux 

"For months, Marial Garang Jil and Chol Marol Deng, two South Sudanese men in their 40s who come from two different Dinka clans in Jonglei state but now live abroad, had been vying to marry Athiak Dau Riak, a girl her mother says is 14.

...

"After the ceremonial part of the wedding in June, when she was given as a wife to Chol Marol Deng, for a payment of 123 cattle, 120m South Sudanese pounds (about $44,000 or £33,000) in cash and a plot of land, she was dubbed “the most expensive bride in South Sudan” in TikTok videos that gained thousands of likes.

...

"South Sudan’s 2008 Child Act prohibits early and forced marriage, but according to Unicef, child marriage is “still a common practice” and “recent figures indicate that 52% of girls [in South Sudan] are married before they turn 18, with some girls being married off as young as 12 years old”.

"An Edinburgh University-led report on the “brideprice” system in South Sudan says “customary courts often accept menstruation as the criteria for eligibility to marry” and early marriage is “a common practice … likely motivated by families’ ambitions to gain brideprices for their daughters as soon as possible”.

"Globally, 12 million girls are married in childhood every year, according to another Unicef report. Across sub-Saharan Africa, more than a third of young women were married before the age of 18."

Regulation of Organ Transplantation and Procurement (Chan and Roth in the JPE)

 Here's a new paper (in final form, online ahead of print) on how organ transplants are regulated.  The paper uses an experiment to make several points about the design of current regulations.  One of them is that transplant centers are incentivized to be risk averse, since they are measured only by the outcomes of the transplants they perform, and not on the outcomes for patients they decline to transplant (so they are reluctant to transplant risky kidneys or risky patients).

Regulation of Organ Transplantation and Procurement: A Market-Design Lab Experiment by Alex Chan and Alvin E. Roth, Journal of Political Economy, online ahead-of-print .

 Abstract: We conduct a lab experiment that shows that current rules regulating transplant centers (TCs) and organ-procurement organizations (OPOs) create perverse incentives that inefficiently reduce both organ recovery and beneficial transplantations. We model the decision environment with a two-player multiround game between an OPO and a TC. In the condition that simulates current rules, OPOs recover only the highest-quality kidneys and forgo valuable recovery opportunities, and TCs decline some beneficial transplants. Alternative regulations that reward TCs and OPOs together for health outcomes in their entire patient pool lead to behaviors that increase organ recovery and appropriate transplants.

Here's what transplants look like in our experimental environment:

And our results are robust to big changes in parameters:

California Bans Legacy Admissions at Private Universities.

 The NYT has the story:

California Bans Legacy Admissions at Private Universities. The change will affect Stanford University, the University of Southern California and other private colleges in the state. By Shawn Hubler and Soumya Karlamangla, Sept. 30, 2024

"California will ban private colleges and universities, including some of the nation’s most selective institutions, from giving special consideration to applicants who have family or other connections to the schools, a practice known as legacy admissions.

"Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation on Monday that will prohibit the practice starting in the fall of 2025.

...

"The University of California, the California State University System and other public California campuses have banned legacy admissions for decades. But private colleges continued to give some preference to the descendants of alumni or major donors.

...

"Only one other state, Maryland, bans legacy preferences at both private and public institutions. Illinois, Virginia and Colorado ban legacy admissions, but only at public universities and colleges.
...

"After the Varsity Blues scandal in 2019, in which parents seeking to win spots in top-ranked schools for their children were found to have paid bribes and falsified their children’s credentials, Mr. Ting tried to push through a bill banning legacy preferences in California. That effort fell short.

"But he did succeed with a measure requiring private colleges to report to the Legislature how many students they admit because of ties to alumni or donors. Those reports showed that the practice was most widespread at Stanford and U.S.C., where, at both schools, about 14 percent of students who were admitted in the fall of 2022 had legacy or donor connections. At Santa Clara University, Mr. Newsom’s alma mater, 13 percent of admissions had such ties.

"Republicans as well as Democrats in the California Legislature voted for Mr. Ting’s latest proposal, which will punish institutions that flout the law by publishing their names on a California Department of Justice website. An earlier version had proposed that schools face civil penalties for violating the law, but that provision was removed in the State Senate."

Golden Goose awards for woodpeckers, penguins, and artificial intelligence

 The Golden Goose awards are given each year to "recognize the tremendous human and economic benefits of federally funded research by highlighting examples of seemingly obscure studies that have led to major breakthroughs and resulted in significant societal impact."

This year they recognize three streams of work, that have led to the recovery of an endangered woodpecker species, to the more effective counting of penguins, and to the invention of neural nets on which the current artificial intelligence industry is based.

Here are those stories.

It’s a Family Affair: The Resurgence of the Red-Cockaded Woodpecker  AWARDEE: Jeff Walters

From Poop to Protection: Satellite Discoveries Help Save Antarctic Penguins and Advance Wildlife Monitoring  AWARDEES: Christian Che-Castaldo, Heather Joan Lynch, Mathew Schwaller

How We Think: Brain-Inspired Models of Human Cognition Contribute to the Foundations of Today’s Artificial Intelligence  AWARDEES: Geoffrey Hinton, James L. McClelland, David E. Rumelhart

Here's the first paragraph of the description of this third award (last but not least:)

"Decades before artificial intelligence emerged as the platform for innovation that it is today, David Rumelhart, James McClelland, and Geoffrey Hinton were exploring a new model to explain human cognition. Dissatisfied with the prevailing symbolic theory of cognition, David Rumelhart began to articulate the need for a new approach to modeling cognition in the mid-1970s, teaming up with McClelland with support from the National Science Foundation to create a model of human perception that employed a new set of foundational ideas. At around the same time, Don Norman, an early leader in the field of cognitive science, obtained funding from the Sloan Foundation to bring together an interdisciplinary group of junior scientists, including Hinton, with backgrounds in computer science, physics, and neuroscience. Rumelhart, McClelland, and Hinton led the development of the parallel distributed processing framework, also known as PDP, in the early-1980s, focusing on how networks of simple processing units, inspired by the properties of neurons in the brain, could give rise to human cognitive abilities. While many had dismissed the use of neural networks as a basis for building models of cognition in the 1960s and 1970s, the PDP group revived interest in the approach. Skeptics critiqued the new models too, and had only limited success in enabling effective artificially intelligent systems until the 2010s, when massive increases in the amount of available data and computer power enabled Hinton and others to achieve breakthroughs leading to an explosion of new technological advancements and applications."

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Prior awards included market design in 2013 and 2014.

Gaming a bike sharing algorithm

 Jacob Leshno points out this NYT story. He writes "The gist of it is that Citi bike pays to deliver bikes to stations with shortages, and someone figured they could make money by creating artificial shortages."

The Hustlers Who Make $6,000 a Month by Gaming Citi Bikes. The bike-sharing program rewards users who help redistribute bikes around New York City. A few riders have figured out how to turn that into profit.  By Christopher Maag (Christopher Maag spent several days in Midtown Manhattan running behind Bike Angels.)

"By monitoring a map of stations on Lyft’s app, they noticed that the algorithm awards points on a sliding scale based on need. Removing a bike from a completely full station: up to four points. Docking at an empty station? That’s worth up to another four. People who move at least four bikes in a 24-hour period get all their points multiplied by a factor of three.

"Lyft pays 20 cents per point. Each ride generates a maximum of 24 points. In perfect conditions, a person on a 3X streak who relocates a bike from a full dock to a completely empty one can earn as much as $4.80 for a single ride.

...

"At 10 a.m. on a Tuesday last month, seven Bike Angels descended on the docking station at Broadway and 53rd Street, across from the Ed Sullivan Theater. Each rider used his own special blue key — a reward from Citi Bike — to unlock a bike. He rode it one block east, to Seventh Avenue. He docked, ran back to Broadway, unlocked another bike and made the trip again.

"By 10:14, the crew had created an algorithmically perfect situation: One station 100 percent full, a short block from another station 100 percent empty. The timing was crucial, because every 15 minutes, Lyft’s algorithm resets, assigning new point values to every bike move.

"The clock struck 10:15. The algorithm, mistaking this manufactured setup for a true emergency, offered the maximum incentive: $4.80 for every bike returned to the Ed Sullivan Theater. The men switched direction, running east and pedaling west."

Milgrom testifies in Google's defense

 Paul Milgrom forwards me this account of his testimony as an expert for the defense in the DOJ v Google trial on display ads. Expert testimony is partly theater, and parts of the article read like a theater review.

Google’s Lawyers Pitch Competing Explanation of Ad Bidding, Reframe Case in Strong Day for Defense  by Tom Blakely

"Tuesday was dominated by the testimony of Google expert Dr. Paul Milgrom, Professor at Stanford University and the Chairman of “Auctionomics.”

"Dr. Milgrom is Google’s counterweight to the government’s Dr. Ravi.

"As soon as his testimony began, I realized he would be a formidable witness, not just because of his outstanding intellect and subject matter expertise, but because he is the kind of witness that is simply challenging for a counterparty to deal with. An older gentleman, he was equal parts charming, intelligent, poised, unflagging while enduring hours on the stand, and spoke with the quiet confidence and humility of the wisdom of his years.

...

"By presenting with charisma, charm, wit, and as one person described to me during a break, “grandpa vibes,” an outside observer who hails from most of the world’s cultures intrinsically wants to like Prof. Milgrom"

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Yesterday's post also touched on expert witnesses for the defense, from the DOJ's perspective:

Friday, September 27, 2024

Are economist for sale?

Are economist for sale?

 Here's a recent NYT column:

The Justice Department’s antitrust chief thinks conflicts of interest are degrading scholarship  By Peter Coy

"Are the world’s most powerful corporations buying the brains of economists and legal scholars? It certainly sounds that way if you listen to the chief antitrust enforcer at the Department of Justice.

...

"Kanter didn’t exactly say anything about buying brains. That’s my flourish. What he did say was that “all over the world, money earmarked specifically to discourage antitrust and competition law enforcement is finding its way into the expert community upon which we all depend.

”He even said: “Conflicts of interest and capture have become so rampant and commonplace that it is increasingly rare to encounter a truly neutral academic expert.”

...

"Part of the problem is inadequate disclosure, he said. “If a paper was shadow-funded or influenced by corporate money, it can pass that influence and whatever flaws or biases it introduced into the papers that build on it,” he said. “This insidious ripple effect is difficult — if not nearly impossible — to detect.”

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I'm not sure how big a problem this is, but here's the American Economic Association's code of professional conduct

AEA Code of Professional Conduct

Adopted April 20, 2018

The American Economic Association holds that principles of professional conduct should guide economists in academia, government, nonprofit organizations, and the private sector.

The AEA's founding purpose of  "the encouragement of economic research" requires intellectual and professional integrity. Integrity demands honesty, care, and transparency in conducting and presenting research; disinterested assessment of ideas; acknowledgement of limits of expertise; and disclosure of real and perceived conflicts of interest.

The AEA encourages the "perfect freedom of economic discussion."  This goal requires an environment where all can freely participate and where each idea is considered on its own merits. Economists have a professional obligation to conduct civil and respectful discourse in all forums, including those that allow confidential or anonymous participation.

The AEA seeks to create a professional environment with equal opportunity and fair treatment for all economists, regardless of age, sex, gender identity and expression, race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, health condition, marital status, parental status, genetic information, political affiliation, professional status, or personal connections.

Economists have both an individual responsibility for their own conduct, and a collective responsibility to promote professional conduct. These responsibilities include developing institutional arrangements and a professional environment that promote free expression concerning economics. These responsibilities also include supporting participation and advancement in the economics profession by individuals from all backgrounds, including particularly those that have been historically underrepresented.

The AEA strives to promote these principles through its activities.

 

About the AEA Code of Professional Conduct

In October 2017, then-AEA President Alvin E. Roth formed an Ad Hoc Committee to Consider a Code of Professional Conduct, and charged it with evaluating various aspects of professional conduct, including those which stifle diversity in Economics. The ad hoc committee, composed of John Campbell (chair), Marianne Bertrand, Pascaline Dupas, Benjamin Edelman, and Matthew D. Shapiro discussed an interim report and draft code with the AEA Executive Committee at its meeting on January 4, 2018, and provided an update to the AEA membership at the Annual Business Meeting on January 5 in Philadelphia. The interim report and draft code were circulated to the membership in January 2018 with an invitation to submit comments. The draft code was revised in response to more than 200 comments received, and the AEA Executive Committee voted on April 20 to adopt the revised Code. The committee thanks all members who offered feedback on the initial draft and would like to emphasize that it read and considered carefully every comment that was submitted. 

To review the interim report from the ad hoc committee, click here.

To review the final report, click here.