$50,000 at issue is error, Boston physician says

In a letter to the Boston Globe, Joseph Biederman, MD, a Massachusetts General Hospital psychiatrist, says that a drug company gave congressional investigators inaccurate information about a payment in 2001. U.S. Senator Charles E. Grassley's office had said that Johnson & Johnson gave Biederman $58,169 in 2001, but the psychiatrist said that he earned just $3,500 from the company that year. Most of the amount of the check, $50,000, was deposited into a hospital account to support a scientific conference, "which was mistakenly assigned to my Social Security number," wrote Biederman.