Strapped for Cash

In the early eighties, a scientist named David B. Baker announced that surface-water in Ohio—drinking water—was contaminated with the chemicals atrazine and alachor. They were, he wrote in one of his papers, major pollutants. The weed-killers, from companies like Monsanto, Ciba-Gigy, and other chemical companies, were in the rivers, which drained into the agricultural watersheds and drinking water. Widely used by farmers in the area, the chemicals drained off the crops during rainstorms and seeped into the soil and into streams and other waterways. Baker’s work on the chemicals was so influential that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) used Baker’s research and conclusions when it reviewed the hazards of atrazine a few years after Baker had initially identified the risk.

But then something changed. Baker was changing his tune. Suddenly he was downplaying the dangers of the herbicides he had earlier warned of; he attacked EPA reports—reports that relied on his own research—that suggested that weed-killers in drinking water posed a major environmental problem.

A scientist changing course in his research is not unusual. If his research indicates that he was heading down the wrong path, he should, and is in fact required by the ethics of his occupation, to acknowledge that. However, many believe Baker was not heading down the wrong path, at least with his research. The data had not changed; his funding sources, however, had: by the early 1990’s, David Baker was getting nearly a third of his research money from the herbicide makers Monsanto, Novartis, Dupont and other chemical companies. Like many university researchers, Baker was strapped for cash. His research was in danger of drying up if more money didn’t appear soon. With the money from Monsanto and others came “better” research. Soon the chemical industry front group National Agricultural Chemical Association was printing Baker’s name on its press releases as its resident expert, and encouraged journalists to interview the scientist. Baker’s change of heart, it seems, came at a high price.

But the chemical industry doesn’t just focus on individual scientists. It infuses many millions of dollars into the nation’s cancer research centers. While industry officials claim their donations are made in the spirit of philanthropy, it is, Dan Fagin and Marianne Lavelle write, “difficult to ignore that, over the years, the nation’s cancer research establishment has done much to bolster the industry’s position that chemicals should not be blamed for disease.” Despite the fact that overwhelming independent research has shown consistently that formaldehyde is a carcinogen, the American Cancer Society lobbied the EPA in the early eighties to back off its proposed regulations of the chemical industry. Even more interesting was the American Cancer Society’s criticism in 1995 of the Delaney Clause of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act which had banned the addition of known carcinogens to processed food. The clause was repealed in 1996.

The Ties That Bind

What if all writers had corporate sponsors? Would you be able to trust anything you read? Most of us can differentiate propaganda from fact, but when it comes to the hallowed discipline of science, with its sacrosanct methods and uniform standards, bias is difficult to detect, if not next to impossible for the average consumer. And yet almost everything we touch, eat, drink, ingest, or put on our bodies is affected by science—sometimes biased science—and the results are only just beginning to manifest.

“Ties between clinical researchers and industry include not only grant support, but also a host of other financial arrangements. Researchers serve as consultants to companies whose products they are studying, join advisory boards and speakers’ bureaus, enter into patent and royalty arrangements, agree to be listed authors of articles ghostwritten by interested companies, promote drugs and devices at company sponsored symposiums, and allow themselves to be plied with expensive gifts and trips to luxurious settings. Many also have equity interest in the companies.”

The words above come from a landmark editorial in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. The journal had been plagued in recent years by charges of conflict of interest among the authors of several of its product reviews. But the journal’s scathing editorial, titled “Is Academic Science For Sale?” and its subsequent requirement for full disclosure of corporate ties by review authors seemed to put the issue to rest. Then, three years later, NEJM loosened its requirements for full disclosure. The pool of scientists unburdened by corporate connections was too small to work from.

Funding for public interest science is drying up—most notably during the Bush Administration—and as a result, industry has overwhelmed and permeated the science. The study of weeds (pesticides) is a good example: consider that seventy five weed scientists work for the federal government; one hundred and eight work for universities. And one thousand, four hundred work for chemical companies.
With one study, conducted with a couple hundred rats, ringing up at around two million dollars, it’s no wonder that research scientists are strapped for cash. While China and South Korea, among other countries, have increased their scientific research budgets by at least ten per cent each year, the United States has drastically cut back research funding. Scientists, increasingly, have nowhere else to turn, and so it is becoming more and more obvious that researchers’ financial ties to the pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturers that are funding their work are directly influencing research and findings when it comes to the benefits or harm of the manufacturer’s product.
And companies themselves are dictating what science is: “Dupont has shown a lack of respect for the civil justice system in general,” U.S. District Court Judge J. Robert Elliott said of the chemical giant. “ Which disrespect was evidenced by the attitude of DuPont’s CEO, Mr. Edgar Woolard, that…’When DuPont says what the science means, that is what the science is.”
Today, more than ever, chemical companies, oil companies, pharmaceutical companies and other corporations have a lot to lose to disinterested science, and so their efforts to control it have intensified. University administrators are rushing into the arms of Corporate America, some eager to keep their research programs alive, others eager for the financial boon of pharmaceutical patents and licensing agreements. Corporations, for their part, have become even more aggressive suitors because they are eager for greater access to “intellectual capital.” As author and longtime critic of private control of universities David Noble has written, “The foundations for the new knowledge-based industries have been laid over the years at great public expense. Now the corporations are positioning them themselves, at minor expense, to ‘skim the cream off the top’, as Al Gore, Jr. has explained.”

Made to Order Science

EExamples of retribution against scientists abound, and it’s not just Big Oil or Big Pharma who are going after the purveyors of research that threatens the bottom line. More and more, the punisher is the United States government:

In 2002, a Department of Agriculture scientist released a series of reports demonstrating that emissions from hog factories operated by large agri-businesses like Tyson’s Foods and Smithfield included an average of one billion antibiotic-resistant bacteria each working day. When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., invited this scientist to speak to a group of farmers in Iowa about this topic, the Pork Producers of America contacted the Department of Agriculture. Days later, the Department of Agriculture forbid the scientist from attending the event. The scientist subsequently told Kennedy that he had been “ordered not to speak at over a dozen events—mainly presentations to local county health departments on his findings.” The USDA finally ordered the scientist to withdraw the study and forbid him from publishing. “And remember,” Kennedy said, “this is a taxpayer-funded study.”

The Bush Administration has ordered federal scientists to refrain from studying the ill effects of methal bromide, a pesticide.

The Bush Administration has ordered federal scientists to refrain from studying mercury—and has muzzled two EPA scientists who were studying mercury poisoning in much the same way NASA tried to muzzle James E. Hansen.

The Department of Interior, under pressure from Big Oil, has altered damning reports on the status of polar bears and caribou populations in the Arctic, changing conclusions that indicate industry practices are harming these animals.

Twelve major studies on global warming have been censored by the Bush Administration

There's No Oil Left in Prince William Sound, right?

Their spines were twisted. Their jaws were unhinged. They had lesions on their heads. Sometimes they had two heads. They were deformed herring from Prince William Sound, and they were deformed, scientists said, because of the eleven million gallons of North Slope crude that had spilled into the Sound when the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in 1989. The National Marine Fisheries Service Lab in Juneau found that weathered oil was affecting young salmon and herring and that eggs were dying before hatching, and that those that managed to hatch were grossly deformed.

And yet, Exxon held firm in its assertion that there was no oil left in the Sound. That, in fact, the Sound was thriving, and that it was better off than it had been before the oil spill. The fact that there had been no herring fishing season since 1993 due to insufficient population levels was due, Exxon said, to “natural variability.”

Federal scientist Jeff Short stayed silent on the question of whether or not the deformed herring were the result of Exxon oil—in fact, he conceded that Exxon could be right that the fluctuating herring levels were due to natural variability—and instead focused on whether or not there actually was remaining oil in the Sound area.
On a beach on Eleanor Island in Prince William Sound’s Northwest Bay, Short walks along the shoreline with a garden spade in his hand. He squats down and turns over a few barnacle-covered rocks. Once he reaches the pebbly sand, he plunges the spade in and removes a spadeful of sand. He removes one more shovelful, and black, viscous oil slowly begins to fill the new pit. Short, unsurprised but not complacent, shakes his head.
“It’s really an insidious poison,” he tells me. “The fact that we can find this much oil fourteen years later—and oil in this toxic condition—means the oil did a lot more damage than we think.” Although Short’s findings have been confirmed by countless biologists, chemists, and other researchers, Exxon says Jeff Short is a bad scientist. And in 2002, it tried to ruin his career.
Short is a slight man, with thinning brown hair, glasses, and an anxious, almost timid demeanor. He has been studying the environmental effects of the spill for years, and in January of 2002, Short reported that there was still Exxon oil—lots of it—in Prince William Sound. The summer before, he’d led a research team that dug nearly nine thousand pits on various island and mainland beaches, using a sampling technique that Short had had reviewed by national experts in order to avoid unintended bias.
“Much more oil was found than anticipated,” Short wrote in an editorial in the Anchorage Daily News. In fact, Short’s research found more than 200 times more oil than Exxon had claimed; on the beaches hardest hit by the spill in 1989, Short reported that the chances of finding oil on those same beaches twelve years later was better than 1 in 3.

Exxon struck back with Professor David Page. A professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Bowdoin College in Maine, Page disparaged Short’s study, calling it bad science. Although ExxonMobil public relations director Tom Cirigliano encouraged me to contact David Page regarding the state of the Sound, Page did not respond to requests for an interview in connection with my article for The Nation.
“There is no credible scientific evidence of ongoing injury to the Prince William Sound ecosystem from the 1989 Valdez spill,” Page wrote in the Alaska Daily News, in response to Short’s editorial.
If this claim sounds unusual, it helps to know that Page is on ExxonMobil’s payroll. (Also on ExxonMobil’s payroll is toxicologist and former vice president for research at Michigan State University, Robert J. Huggett. “An ecosystem never recovers when there’s money to be made off of it,” he says.)
Exxon filed a Freedom of Information Act request to acquire Short’s research records (which he maintains he would have given freely had he only been asked); however, when asked for its scientific research, Exxon refused. Interestingly, the data and scientific records of privately-funded scientists, like David Page, can be kept secret—which means, Short says, that their research escapes the scrutiny necessary to expose scientific fraud.
Before David Page reviewed all of Short’s research, he published the editorial in the Anchorage Daily News, calling Short’s scientific methods into question. As a result, the sponsor of Short’s research, the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, commissioned a scientific review of Short’s methods by a National Marine Fisheries Service panel that was independent of Auke Bay Labs. Such a rebuke is a career-derailer for a scientist.

To further bolster their position, Short says, Exxon has funded a host of studies by their consultants and has “launched a campaign to intimidate and discredit publicly supported scientists whose studies are contradictory” to those of the Exxon consultants.
“Tactics have included misrepresentation of government data, manipulating agendas of scientific meetings, abuse of the scientific peer-review process, shadowing government field studies and groundless allegation of scientific misconduct.” (In fact, Short himself had been shadowed by an ExxonMobil consultant as he completed his damning 2001 study.)
Ultimately, the review by Short’s sponsor called Short’s study “rigorous, well-designed and executed.” In fact, the review found that if there was any bias in Short’s sampling, it was that he left out sites that were more likely to show oil. However, with the black mark of a review of research techniques, it will take some time for Short to piece his reputation back together again.
The oil giant has good reason to denigrate the research conducted by Short, and other scientists studying the after-effects of the 1989 spill. In 1991, Exxon and the federal government, along with the State of Alaska, settled the civil and criminal lawsuits resulting from the spill (a $4.5 billion punitive award to the tens of thousands of fishers and Native Alaskans affected by the spill has been in appeals for nearly seventeen years.) With the nine hundred million dollar settlement funds, the government established the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, which spends much of its budget funding ongoing research on the Sound.

Exxon fears one section of the settlement, called “Reopener for Unknown Injury.” This section allows the federal and state governments to claim another one hundred million from Exxon by September 2006. And, in fact, on June 2, 2006, that is exactly what the Justice Department and the state of Alaska did. The New York Times reported that both the federal and state government believe lingering Exxon oil is hampering the recovery of animals in the Sound. A comment from Mark Bourdreux, Exxon’s media relations manager, hints at the scientific battle to come: he told the Times that a link between the remaining oil and effects on wildlife “is no more than a hypothesis.” This battle could make Jeff Short’s tussle with the oil giant seem like a minor skirmish by comparison.