When other researchers have examined the link between funding sources and research outcomes, they have reached conclusions similar to Davidson’s:• In 1994, researchers in Boston studied the relationship between funding and reported drug performance in published trials of anti-inflammatory drugs used in the treatment of arthritis. They reviewed 56 drug trials and found that in every single case, the manufacturer-associated drug was reported as being equal or superior in efficacy and toxicity to the comparison drug. “These claims of superiority, especially in regard to side effects, are often not supported by the trial data,” they added. “These data raise concerns about selective publication or biased interpretation of results in manufacturer-associated trials.”59
• In 1996, researchers Mildred K. Cho and Lisa A. Bero compared studies of new drug therapies and found that 98 percent of the studies funded by a drug’s maker reached favorable conclusions about its safety and efficacy, compared to 76 percent of studies funded by independent sources.60
• In 1998, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study that examined the relationship between drug-industry funding and research conclusions about calcium-channel blockers, a class of drugs used to treat high blood pressure. There are safety concerns about the use of calcium-channel blockers because of research showing that they present a higher risk of heart attacks than other older and cheaper forms of blood pressure medication such as diuretics and beta-blockers. The NEJM study examined 70 articles on channel blockers and classified them into three categories: favorable, neutral, and critical. It found that 96 percent of the authors of favorable articles had financial ties to manufacturers of calcium-channel blockers, compared with 60 percent of the neutral authors and 37 percent of the critical authors. Only two of the 70 articles disclosed the authors’ corporate ties.61
• In October 1999, researchers at Northwestern University in Chicago studied the relationship between funding sources and conclusions reached by studies of new cancer drugs and found that studies sponsored by drug companies were nearly eight times less likely to report unfavorable conclusions than studies paid for by nonprofit organizations.62
Drug research is not the only field in which this pattern of funding-related bias can be detected. In 1996, journalists Dan Fagin and Marianne Lavelle reviewed recent studies published in major scientific journals regarding the safety of four chemicals: the herbicides alachlor and atrazine, formaldehyde, and perchloroethylene, the carcinogenic solvent used for dry-cleaning clothes. When non-industry scientists did the studies, 60 percent returned results unfavorable to the chemicals involved, whereas industry-funded scientists came back with favorable results 74 percent of the time. Fagin and Lavelle observed a particularly strong biasing influence with respect to agribusiness financing for research related to farm weed control. “Weed scientists—a close-knit fraternity of researchers in industry, academia, and government—like to call themselves ‘nozzleheads’ or ‘spray and pray guys,’ ” they stated. “As the nicknames suggest, their focus is usually much narrower than weeds. As many of its leading practitioners admit, weed science almost always means herbicide science, and herbicide science almost always means herbicide-justification science. Using their clout as the most important source of research dollars, chemical companies have skillfully wielded weed scientists to ward off the EPA, organic farmers, and others who want to wean American farmers away from their dependence on atrazine, alachlor, and other chemical weedkillers.”63
Sometimes industry-funded studies become so self-promotional that they seem almost like parodies. In May 1998, the prestigious Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction teamed with the psychology department of Indiana University to study the effect of odor on women’s sexual arousal. “This is a complex area,” explained research leader Cynthia Graham in describing her study, which was sponsored by the Olfactory Research Fund, an organization financed by the perfume and cologne industry. Described by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as a “rigorous experiment,” the study asked 33 women to view an erotic movie or engage in sexual fantasy, while researchers measured physical changes to their genitals. To test the effect of fragrance on arousal, the experimenters had the women wear a necklace scented with either women’s perfume, men’s cologne, or water. “The strongest, scientifically significant finding from the study was that male cologne markedly increased sexual arousal among women in the two days after the end of a woman’s menstrual period,” the Journal Sentinel reported.64
The public today is bombarded with scientific information regarding the safety and efficacy of everything from drugs to seat belts to children’s toys. Eating garlic bread brings families closer together, says research sponsored by Pepperidge Farms bakeries, which makes frozen garlic bread. Eating oat bran lowers cholesterol, according to research sponsored by Quaker Oats. Eating chocolate may prevent cavities, says the Princeton Dental Resource Center, which is financed by the M&M/Mars candy company and is not a part of Princeton University. A daily glass of red wine reduces your risk of heart disease, say the doctors hired by the liquor industry. Chromium picolinate taken as a dietary supplement will help you burn off fat, says the dietary supplement industry. Zinc lozenges might shorten the duration of the common cold, reports a researcher who happens to hold 9,000 shares of stock in a zinc lozenge company.
Much of this information is confusing and contradictory. Sometimes the contradictions reflect genuine disagreements, but often they simply mirror the opposing interests of different companies and industries. Wearing sunscreen at the beach is important to avoid skin cancer, say doctors affiliated with Partners for Sun Protection, an organization sponsored by Schering-Plough, the pharmaceutical company that makes Coppertone sun lotion. On the other hand, studies sponsored by the International Smart Tan Network, a trade group representing tanning salons, claim that “regular tanning sessions could prevent as many as 30,000 cancer deaths every year in the United States.” According to the ISTN, “legitimate research” shows that “giant pharmaceutical firms” and “dermatology industry lobbyists” have fomented unwarranted “paranoia” about tanning-related skin cancers.
When covering these topics, journalists have a responsibility to do more than present a source simply as “a scientist from such-and-such university.” The public needs to know the context with which to weigh the information it receives. Does the scientist or other expert receive any funding from companies with a stake in the topic? Are there other conflicts of interest? Is there a pattern to the expert’s past pronouncements or affiliations that suggests a particular ideological bent? Do the expert’s opinions match or contradict the opinions of the majority of other experts on the subject at hand? These questions deserve to be answered, but are rarely even asked.
9
The Junkyard Dogs
Unfortunately, and increasingly today, one can find examples of junk science that compromise the integrity of the field of science and, at the same time, create a scare environment where unnecessary regulations on industry in general, and on the consumer products industry in particular, are rammed through without respect to rhyme, reason, effect or cause.
—Michael A. Miles, former CEO of the Philip Morris tobacco company1
Given the prominent role that science plays in modern society, it is hardly surprising that debates should arise over its conclusions and methods. Some of the worst atrocities of the past century have been perpetrated in the name of science, including experiments with “scientific socialism,” the racist science of eugenics, and the polluting depredations of modern industry. Major corporations and petty hustlers alike use the mantle of science to market all kinds of potions and remedies, many of which have no demonstrable efficacy and some of which are harmful. The history of psychiatry and the other social sciences is also riddled with scientific-sounding explanations for human behavior, on the basis of which innocent people have been sterilized, lobotomized, drugged against their will, or imprisoned.
The concept of “junk science
,” however, is a particular term coined by corporate attorneys, lobbyists, PR firms, and industry-funded think tanks. It has very little to do with the quality of the research in question. In the hotly contested terrain of regulatory and liability law, “junk science” is the term that corporate defenders apply to any research, no matter how rigorous, that justifies regulations to protect the environment and public health. The opposing term, “sound science,” is used in reference to any research, no matter how flawed, that can be used to challenge, defeat, or reverse environmental and public health protections.
“Junk science” first emerged in the courtroom as a disparaging term for the paid expert witnesses that attorneys hire to testify on behalf of their clients. In many cases, of course, an expert witness is unnecessary. If one person shoots another in front of witnesses, you don’t need a rocket scientist to know who is responsible. During the twentieth century, however, courts expanded the system of tort law under which personal-injury lawsuits are filed in order to cover cases in which proof of causation is somewhat more complicated. Many of these cases require a scientist’s testimony particularly when the injury in question comes from environmental or toxic causes—for example, cancer in army veterans subjected to radiation from atomic bomb tests; asbestos-related mesothelioma; Reyes Syndrome caused by taking aspirin; or the link between swine flu vaccinations and Guillain-Barré Syndrome. By expanding the system of tort law, courts made it possible for people injured through these sorts of causes to collect damages from the companies responsible. Of course, the fact that these cases could have their day in court does not mean that the plaintiffs are guaranteed victory. In one of the “toxic tort” cases that has been frequently cited as an example of junk science in action, Merrell Dow pharmaceuticals successfully defended itself in court against 1,200 plaintiffs who charged that its morning-sickness drug, Bendectin, caused birth defects.
The idea that junk science was running amok in the courtroom received wide attention in the late 1980s with the publication of Galileo’s Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom. Authored by engineer and attorney Peter Huber, Galileo’s Revenge argued that money-grubbing lawyers are using spurious science to collect huge, undeserved injury settlements from innocent companies. The title of Huber’s book reflects his contention that corporations today have become victims of Galileo’s mythic status as a symbol of scientific integrity. Galileo may have been right, Huber said, when he stood alone against the repressive force of established convention, but scientists today who propose similarly heretical theories are mostly opportunists whose opinions merely contaminate the legal system by enabling frivolous lawsuits to proceed. “Maverick scientists shunned by their reputable colleagues have been embraced by lawyers,” Huber wrote. “Almost any self-styled scientist, no matter how strange or iconoclastic his views, will be welcome to testify in court. . . . Junk science is impelled through our courts by a mix of opportunity and incentive. ‘Let-it-all-in’ legal theory creates the opportunity. The incentive is money.”2
Junk scientists, Huber said, can be recognized because they “do not use regular channels of communication, such as journals, for reporting scientific information, but rely instead on the mass media and word of mouth.”3 Yet Huber’s own book and his opinions about junk science reached the public through a massive publicity blitz, beginning with a 1986 forum on “the liability crisis” sponsored by the Manhattan Institute for Public Policy Research, where Huber holds the title of senior fellow. “Reporters from all the national papers and magazines were there and the event generated numerous news articles,” stated the institute’s internal report on the campaign. The forum then became the basis for a 24-page Manhattan Report that “was mailed to 25,000 carefully selected people in government, academia, business, media and the law. . . . We held two workshops, one in Washington, DC in June and one in New York in August. The first included thirty corporate government affairs officers while the second, a full-day seminar, brought together fifteen academic scholars from throughout the country. . . . With assistance from a number of our friends, we compiled a mailing list of over 400 journalists who have written about the liability crisis. . . . Our project director, Walter Olson, published numerous ‘op eds’ on the subject, including a major piece in the Wall Street Journal.”4
Huber’s own scholarship, moreover, is open to the same charges of “data dredging, wishful thinking, truculent dogmatism, and, now and again, outright fraud” that he attributes to junk science. In the American University Law Review, Kenneth Chesebro has pointed to numerous factual distortions in the legal case studies that Huber cites. Huber is also the source for a widely cited statistic which claims that liability lawsuits cost the American economy $300 billion per year. When University of Wisconsin law professor Marc Galanter examined that claim, however, he discovered that its sole basis in fact was a “single sentence spoken by corporate executive Robert Malott in a 1986 roundtable discussion of corporate liability.” Malott had estimated that liability lawsuits cost corporations $80 billion per year—a number that Galanter notes is “far higher than the estimates in careful and systematic studies of these costs. Huber then multiplied Malott’s surmise by 3.5, rounded it up to $300 billion, and called that the ‘indirect cost’ of the tort system.”5
A court of law is not a laboratory, and good science does not prevail there any more often than justice itself does. Bad verdicts, like bad science, have been with us for a long time. For Huber, however, only certain offenses seemed to deserve the label “junk science.” Although he made a few offhand references to smoking as “our most routine form of suicide,” his anecdotal examples of junk science in action never mentioned the tobacco industry’s hired use of scientific guns to defend itself in court. “Due in large part to the scientific testimony,” boasted an R. J. Reynolds executive in a 1981 speech, “no plaintiff has ever collected a penny from any tobacco company in lawsuits claiming that smoking causes lung cancer or cardiovascular illness—even though 117 such cases have been brought since 1954.”6 This boast was still valid when Galileo’s Revenge hit bookstore shelves, yet Huber never used the term “junk science” in reference to tobacco science—deference which may possibly reflect the fact that Huber’s employer, the Manhattan Institute, is a conservative think tank that is significantly supported by tobacco money, along with other industries that have their own vested interests in limiting lawsuit-related corporate liability.7
By the 1990s, in fact, the tobacco industry itself was using the term “junk science” to assail its critics. Its behind-the-scenes sponsorship of organizations purporting to defend sound science constitutes one of the great underreported stories of the past decade. The Lancet, England’s leading medical journal, published an account of this story for the first time on April 8, 2000. Written by University of California-San Francisco researchers Stanton Glantz and Elisa Ong, the Lancet story examined never-before-published internal documents from Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds and discovered a covert campaign that was prodigiously expensive, international in scope, and capable of reaching even into the editorial offices of the Lancet itself.
The article by Glantz and Ong focused on the tobacco industry’s activities in Europe, but that is only part of the tale. In the United States as well, the tobacco industry has successfully manipulated the rhetoric of “junk science.” Even former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, one of tobacco’s most outspoken critics, has been unwittingly drafted into the campaign, his words twisted to make him sound like an industry ally.
Alar Mists
The concept of “junk science” broadened to arenas outside the courtroom in 1989 when pro-industry groups used the term to attack what has come to be known as “the great Alar scare.” Alar was a chemical, first marketed in 1968, that apple growers sprayed on trees to make their apples ripen longer before falling off. In use, however, Alar breaks down to a by-product called “unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine,” or UDMH. The first study showing that UDMH can cause cancer was published in 19
73. Further studies published in 1977 and 1978 confirmed that Alar and UDMH caused tumors in laboratory animals. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency opened an investigation of Alar’s hazards in 1980, but shelved the investigation after a closed meeting with Alar’s manufacturer, the Uniroyal Chemical Company. In 1984, the EPA reopened its investigation, concluding in 1985 that both Alar and UDMH were “probable human carcinogens.” Under pressure from the manufacturer, however, the EPA allowed Alar to stay on the market. Its use continued, even after tests by the National Food Processors Association and Gerber Baby Foods repeatedly detected Alar in samples of applesauce and apple juice, including formulations for infants.
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