Scientific advisory panels are frequently filled with experts who have close financial ties to the same industries that manufacture the products they review.
“I think universities really need to think more carefully about protecting their investigators from their sponsors,” Bero says. “A lot of these things are not illegal; there’s no university policy against them.”
Most Americans rarely think of science as something crucial to the way government operates. Yet, as Seth Shulman explains in his book Undermining Science, “the U.S. government runs on information—vast amounts of it.” Scientists at the Department of Agriculture track airborne bacteria resulting from farm wastes, experts at the Centers for Disease Control examine samples to help guard against large-scale disease outbreaks, and regulators at the EPA set standards for pesticide use and exposure. By necessity, most of these federal agencies work closely with industry, but more and more their internal functions are also being privatized. Scientific advisory panels are frequently filled with experts who have close financial and other ties to the same industries that manufacture the products they are reviewing. Agencies also outsource their regulatory functions to private-sector contractors and forge new public-private research ventures.
Consider the Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The center has only two full-time employees and one part-time; until recently the rest of the center’s workforce was supplied by Sciences International (SI), a private consulting firm that has been funded by more than 40 chemical industry clients. For nearly a decade, the center had been outsourcing much of its work to SI, which assessed health risks and drafted reviews for 21 chemicals that the center was reviewing for their possible impact on human reproductive health. This April, NIH terminated its contract with SI after learning that the company or its employees had business ties to the chemical industry.
Another variant of privatization can be seen at the FDA, which currently draws more than 50 percent of its total drug review budget from user fees paid by the pharmaceutical industry. David Kessler, a former head of the FDA, recently told The Wall Street Journal, “There is no doubt that user fees give the industry leverage on setting the agency’s priorities. There are significant risks.” Marcia Angell, the former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, puts it more bluntly: “The FDA has been captured by the industry it is supposed to regulate.”
Epidemiologist David Michaels
Image courtesy of Dawn Garrot/
George Washington Univ.
Medical Center
What’s troubling about these trends is that most federal agencies are poorly equipped to protect themselves from undue corporate influence, says David Michaels, an epidemiologist at George Washington University and former assistant secretary for environment, safety, and health at the Department of Energy. Regulatory agencies must rely on large quantities of scientific evidence submitted to them by private industry. This evidence is needed to determine the hazards and characteristics of industrial chemicals, products, and wastes. But according to Michaels, most of these federal agencies lack even the most rudimentary tools that a medical journal editor would use to assess the quality and scientific integrity of industry-funded research.
At the EPA and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, regulators do not have the authority to inquire as to who paid for the studies they receive. The Mine Safety and Health Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration also lack any formal mechanisms for identifying potential conflicts of interest or for assessing the level of industry influence over the research.
In general, industry-funded studies are also subject to far less oversight than comparable federally funded studies. The data underlying private research do not have to be made public, unlike the data from federally sponsored research. A privately funded study can also avoid external scrutiny simply by being labeled “confidential business information.” One study by the Government Accountability Office found that a majority of the applications submitted to the EPA to market new chemicals contained science-based information that industry had labeled confidential.
As a result of these trends, Lisa Bero says, science has become one of the most powerful tools that private companies can use to fight regulation. The strategy they most often deploy was pioneered by the tobacco industry, which learned to foment scientific uncertainty as a means of staving off regulation. A famous tobacco industry document from 1969 spells out the strategy succinctly: “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing controversy.”
In 2003, Frank Luntz, a political consultant to the Republican Party, recommended using the same strategy to combat public environmental concerns. “Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community,” he wrote. “Should the public come to believe the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”
“Some policymakers fail to recognize that all studies are not created equal,” says Michaels, the author of a forthcoming book, Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health. “This results in the existence of what appear to be equal and opposite studies, encouraging policymakers to do nothing in the face of what appear to be contradictory findings.”
Virtually everyone interviewed for this article agrees about one thing: The U.S. government must strengthen its investment in science. The members of Norman Augustine’s 2005 National Academies panel continue to call for an immediate doubling of federal investment in basic science, arguing that basic science is a quintessential public good that only the federal government can properly fund. The rewards of basic research are risky and diffuse, making it difficult for individual companies to invest in.
The question of whether privatization has tipped the balance too far from noncommercial, public-interest science is more contested. “I’m more worried about the converse: Not that industry is dominating science but rather that government is abdicating what I think should be its role,” panel member Richard Zare says. Augustine agrees, but he acknowledges that commercialization of the public sphere does present challenges. “The environment we’ve seen does apply pressure in the direction of more applied work at our universities and our government labs. It just requires balance and that’s what makes it difficult,” he says. “If the end product of basic research is articles published in scientific journals, that’s very commendable, but it doesn’t likely impact on the economy short-term. On the other hand, if scientific research is neglected to focus on near-term, quick payoff pursuits, then very quickly the supply of knowledge will be exhausted.”
Some critics of privatization say that more public funding is pivotal not just for basic science but for public health and regulatory science as well. Their argument is much the same: Who else, other than the federal government, can ensure that this science for the public good is reliably carried out? They also say stronger “public interest” protections are urgently needed: stricter conflict of interest rules in both academia and the government, and prohibitions against commercial ghostwriting and corporate control of statistical analysis and raw data.
Once the genie is out of the bottle, it isn’t easy to get it back in. The more that public-sector scientists become invested in the status quo—through industry grants, patents, and the like—the less likely they are to support reforms. Not so long ago, academics and government scientists insured that the basic building blocks of science were freely available to everyone. Today, the Columbia economist Richard Nelson points out, a sizable portion of this public knowledge is private property. Is this something that should—or even could—be reversed?
The dilemma, says Eric Campbell of Harvard, is that industry partnerships yield many positive benefits: funding opportunities, the conversion of knowledge into products that benefit the public, rewards for inventors, jobs, economic growth. On the other hand, “the fundamental reason the public invests in science is out of the belief that it represents truth, untainted by commercial interests,” he says. “So to call that into question, I think, is really one of the great risks.”
