The University of Wisconsin enjoys a sterling reputation for policing the ethics of its medical school faculty and staff.
“They’re one of our stars,” said Susan C. Chimonas of the Institute on Medicine as a Profession at Columbia University, which ranks institutions on the quality of their programs to avoid and disclose ethical conflicts of interest, like taking money from companies while treating patients with their products.
Some university officials were thus unpleasantly surprised by recent newspaper articles that detailed how Thomas A. Zdeblick, a renowned spine surgeon who is chairman of the university’s department of orthopedics, collected $19.4 million between 2003 and 2007 from Medtronic, a medical-device supplier that sells spinal implants developed by Dr. Zdeblick.