Board rubber-stamps contracts with conflicts

At a recent Michigan State University Board of Trustees meeting, the institution’s overseers promptly approved a peculiar agreement.

Associate professor of biochemistry Erik Martinez-Hackert would receive tens of thousands in federal grant funding to serve as the “principal investigator” on a research collaboration between the university and the for-profit, biomedical company he owns, Advertent Therapeutics.

That means he was working in his MSU capacity, in a university lab, to develop a biomedical technology his private company could one day profit from…

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