University of Toronto
UniversityPublic university,research
| University of Toronto link () Website | |
|---|---|
| File:Utoronto coa.png | |
| Motto | Latin: Velut arbor ævo |
| Headquarters | Toronto,Ontario,Canada |
| Type | Public university,research |
| Other name | Varsity Blues |
| The most important university in Canada | |
The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada. Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed its present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution. As a collegiate university, it comprises eleven colleges each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs and significant differences in character and history.
The University of Toronto alumni include three Governors General of Canada, five Prime Ministers of Canada, nine foreign leaders, and seventeen justices of the Supreme Court of Canada. As of March 2019, 12 Nobel laureates, six Turing Award winners, 94 Rhodes Scholars, and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with the university.
Big Pharma influence
Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
The University's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) is Canada's largest mental health teaching hospital and "one of the world's leading research centres in its field".[1]
In August 2000, the center hired the psychiatrist David Healy. He is a historian of psychopharmacology and as an outspoken critic of the Prozac class of antidepressants. When he gave a lecture at CAMH in November, "it was very well received by much of the audience both there and then a few days later at Cornell in New York"[2]. But David Goldbloom, physician-in-chief at CAMH, who was to be Dr Healy's new boss, was upset. People would take two things from the lecture, he told Dr Healy: first that Prozac caused people to commit suicide and second that antidepressants were too widely used. Within days he had emailed Dr Healy saying he had something urgent to discuss, and on December 7 he told him the job offer was rescinded on the grounds that there was "not a good fit" between him and CAMH. [2]
Of relevance is that CAMH has received more than $1.5m in the years before from Eli Lilly, the manufacturers of Prozac. Healy believes the presence of Charles Nemeroff, dubbed "the most powerful man in psychiatry" and the "boss of bosses" by medical journals, played a bigger role in the dismissal. Nemeroff is "among the most coveted advisers to the pharmaceutical industry, a professor of psychopharmacology at Emory University in Atlanta, and has strong links to, and at the time held shares in, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer.[2]
The case was settled, out of court in Healy's favor.[2]
Hospital for Sick Children
In the 1990s, Nancy Olivieri, a Toronto-based researcher, incurred the wrath of a pharmaceutical company when she told the world of the results of a clinical trial which showed, she believed, that a drug for thalassaemia would harm, rather than help, sick children. The Hospital for Sick Children, where she worked, part of the University of Toronto, tried to fire her when she refused to cooperate with an investigating committee whose members, she said, had too many links to drug companies.[2]