Projo 7 to 7 News Blog

"There are a lot of individuals and families out there whose lives have been affected by loved ones with psychiatric illness and try to imagine what they can to do to be helpful," said Dr. Lawrence H. Price, Butler's director of research.

At a news conference at Butler announcing the fund Tuesday, Laurie White, president of the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, called the fund another way to "leverage the power of the knowledge economy" to bring jobs and money to Rhode Island.

Dr. Steven A. Rasmussen, Butler's medical director, said the hospital receives about $18 million in research funding, mostly from the National Institutes of Health and organizations concerned with specific diseases. "One of the things we're hoping to do is develop more young researchers who will provide the basic research," he said.

Career development grants for up-and-coming researchers cover only a fraction of the overhead costs associated with the research. As a result, the hospital loses money on this work and has to limit the number of such grants its researchers can apply for. The endowment, it is hoped, "will allow us to put in as many grants as we have worthy researchers," Rasmussen said.

It will also provide money for pilot projects demonstrating that a research concept is promising and feasible, work that often must precede a bigger grant.

Butler is affiliated with the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, and Rasmussen will soon become Brown's interim chairman of psychiatry. But Brown is not involved in this effort. "Brown unfortunately doesn't have a whole bunch of money to give for its medical school," Rasmussen said.

The fund has not established any rules limiting who can donate. Dr. Roy Poses, director of the Rhode Island-based Foundation for Integrity and Responsibility in Medicine, a group concerned with conflicts of interest in health care, said that question "ought to be on the minds of people setting up such a fund." In recent years, doctors who received money from pharmaceutical companies have been accused of skewing their data to benefit the drug companies. The controversy has primarily involved psychiatrists, including Brown's outgoing chairman of psychiatry, Dr. Martin Keller.

"If there are no rules for this fund," Poses said, "there is a risk that donors from the health care sector could influence what research is done, how it is done, and the how the results are reported -- to the detriment of science and patient care."

But Price, Butler's research director, said it had never occurred to him that a drug company might give to this endowment. Price and others pointed out that donations would be pooled and interest from them later disbursed in small amounts. Unlike with the controversial research, there would be no opportunity for direct industry funding of specific studies. And if anyone offered a donation with strings attached, Price said, "We would decline it."