Trust Us, We're Experts PA

by Sheldon Rampton

  At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor George Rathjens observed that “a very large fraction” of the school’s students were destined to find careers dependent on the military:They don’t know, when they enter as freshmen, what they will be doing when they graduate, of course. But, on a probabilistic basis, it is reasonable for them to assume they are very likely to be working in defense programs. And they surely can’t foresee how that work will affect mankind’s welfare, when they can’t possibly predict whether they will be working on a particular kind of bomber, against whom it might be used, or whether in an unjust or a just war. But, they have to make decisions about whether or not they want to get into a particular profession when they are about 18 years old, and for many, those decisions will be virtually irrevocable. It is hard to get out. I have talked to many people, scientists and engineers, who were working around Route 128, the high technology community around Boston, who were desperate during the Vietnamese War to get out of the defense business. They had no options. They really had nowhere else to go. They could go out and sell vacuum cleaners, perhaps, but if they wanted to use the skills that they spent a lifetime acquiring, they didn’t have much choice. I have a friend, who was one of the principal weapon designers at Los Alamos for many years. At age 50 or so, he decided he really didn’t want to make bombs anymore. He had had enough. What does a person like that do? There just aren’t very many options for a man like that, at that age.38

  By the 1960s, military programs had come to employ nearly a third of the scientists and engineers in the United States. The militarization of science had become, and remains, a central organizing condition of U.S. government-funded science research. Even in 1998, nearly a decade after the end of the Cold War, military research and development represented 53 percent of the U.S. federal R & D budget.

  Even outside the scope of military programs, a top-down, command-driven rhetoric of science has seeped into many aspects of national life. Billion-dollar foundations and massive government research contracts became commonplace. University professors mastered the intricate rules of grantsmanship and learned to walk the narrow path between consultation and conflict of interest. As federal tax policies underwrote and shaped private giving, the distinction between public and private grants began to blur. Lyndon Johnson brought the concept of policy-oriented social science to new levels in the pursuit of two wars—the Vietnam War and the War on Poverty. Presidential chronicler Theodore White described the Johnson years as the “Golden age of the action intellectual,” as experts were brought in “to shape our defenses, guide our foreign policy, redesign our cities, eliminate poverty, reorganize our schools.”39 A few years later, President Nixon would invoke the military metaphor again when he declared “war on cancer” in his 1971 State of the Union speech. Each of these wars came with their concomitant experts, whose job was to reassure the public with confident promises that inevitable victory was near at hand, that there was “light at the end of the tunnel.”

  The last quarter of the twentieth century saw the commercialization of big science, as the rise of the so-called “knowledge-based” industries—computers, telecommunications, and biotechnology—prompted a wide variety of corporate research initiatives. In 1970, federal government funding for research and development totaled $14.9 billion, compared to $10.4 billion from industry. By 1997, government expenditures were $62.7 billion, compared to $133.3 billion from industry. After adjusting for inflation, government spending had barely risen, while business spending more than tripled.40 Much of this increase, moreover, took place through corporate partnerships with universities and other academic institutions, blurring the traditional line between private and public research. In 1980, industrial funding made up only 3.8 percent of the total research budget for U.S. universities. “Seldom controversial, it provided contacts and financial benefits usually only to individual faculty members, and on the whole it did not divert them from university responsibilities,” Nelkin noted. However, declining public funding in many areas of research “left many faculty and university administrators receptive to, indeed, eager for industrial support, and inevitably less critical of the implications for the ownership and control of research.”

  First reluctantly and then eagerly, universities began to collaborate with industry in fields such as biotechnology, agriculture, chemistry, mining, energy, and computer science. “It is now accepted practice for scientists and institutions to profit directly from the results of academic research through various types of commercial ventures,” Nelkin observed in her 1984 book,41 and what was a noteworthy trend back then has since become a defining characteristic of university research. Between 1981 and 1995, the proportion of U.S. industry-produced articles that were coauthored with at least one academic researcher roughly doubled, from 21.6 percent to 40.8 percent. The increase was even more dramatic in the field of biomedical research, where the number of coauthored articles quadrupled.42 According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, corporate sponsorship of university medical research has grown from about 5 percent in the early 1980s to as much as 25 percent in some places today.43

  In 1999, the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California-Berkeley signed an unprecedented five-year, $25 million agreement with the Novartis biotech firm of Switzerland. In exchange for the funding, the university promised that Novartis would have first bid on a third of the research discoveries developed by the department. “The Berkeley agreement has inspired other major American research universities to seek similar agreements with industry,” noted the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.44 But although the deal was popular with the department that received the money, it drew a different reaction from many of the professors in other departments. A survey conducted by the chairman of the university’s College of Natural Resources showed that two-thirds of the faculty in that college disagreed with the terms of the contract.

  “We fear that in our public university, a professor’s ability to attract private investment will be more important than academic qualifications, taking away the incentives for scientists to be socially responsible,” stated professors Miguel Altieri and Andrew Paul Gutierrez in a letter to the university’s alumni magazine. Altieri’s academic career has been devoted to the study of “biological control”—the discipline of controlling agricultural pests through means other than pesticides. He noted bitterly that while money from Novartis was pouring in, university funding for biological control research had been eliminated. “For more than 40 years we trained leaders in the world about biological control . . . A whole theory was established here, because pesticides cause major environmental problems,” Altieri said.45 Another researcher, UC-Berkeley anthropologist Laura Nader, said the Novartis contract “sent a chill especially over younger, untenured faculty. Word gets around early . . . over the proper relationship between researchers and industry in a university setting. A siege mentality sets in, reminiscent of the McCarthy period and the so-called Red Scare, except then it was government which could be called to account and was, and now this is as yet unaccountable large companies.”46

  Just as military funding for research carried with it a set of obligations that had nothing to do with the pursuit of knowledge, corporate funding has transformed scientific and engineering knowledge into commodities in the new “information economy,” giving rise to an elaborate web of interlocking directorates between corporate and academic boardrooms. By the end of the 1990s, the ivory tower of academia had become “Enterprise U,” as schools sought to cash in with licensing and merchandising of school logos and an endless variety of university-industry partnerships and “technology transfers,” from business-funded research parks to fee-for-service work such as drug trials carried out on university campuses. Professors, particularly in high-tech fields, were not only allowed but encouraged to moonlight as entrepreneurs in start-up businesses that attempted to convert their laboratory discoveries into commercial products. Just as
science had earlier become a handmaiden to the military, now it was becoming a servant of Wall Street.

  “We’re adopting a business instead of an economic model,” said chemist Brian M. Tissue of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. “The rationale is collaborations are good because they bring in money. People say we can have better facilities and more students, and it’s a win-win situation, but it’s not. There can be benefits, but you’re not training students anymore; you’re bringing them in to work a contract. The emphasis shifts from what’s good for the student to the bottom line.”47 “More and more we see the career trajectories of scholars, especially of scientists, rise and fall not in relation to their intellectually-judged peer standing, but rather in relation to their skill at selling themselves to those, especially in the biomedical field, who have large sums of money to spend on a well-marketed promise of commercial viability,” observed Martin Michaelson, an attorney who has represented Harvard University and a variety of other leading institutions of higher education. “It is a kind of gold rush,” Michaelson said at a 1999 symposium sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “More and more we see incentives to hoard, not disseminate, new knowledge; to suppress, not publish, research results; to titillate prospective buyers, rather than to make full disclosure to academic colleagues. And we see today, more than ever before, new science first—generally, very carefully, and thinly—described in the fine print of initial public offerings and SEC filings, rather than in the traditional, fuller loci of academic communication.”48

  Industry-academic entanglements can take many forms, some of which are not directly related to funding for specific research. Increasingly, scientists are being asked to sit on the boards of directors of for-profit companies, a service that requires relatively little time but can pay very well—often in excess of $50,000 per year. Other private-sector perks may include gifts to researchers of lab equipment or cash, or generous payment for speeches, travel, and consulting.

  Corporate funding creates a culture of secrecy that can be as chilling to free academic inquiry as funding from the military. Instead of government censorship, we hear the language of commerce: nondisclosure agreements, patent rights, intellectual property rights, intellectual capital. Businesses frequently require scientists to keep “proprietary information” under wraps so that competitors can’t horn in on their trade secrets. “If we could not maintain secrecy, research would be of little value,” argued the late Arthur Bueche, vice president for research at General Electric. “Research properly leads to patents that protect ideas, but were it not for secrecy, it would be difficult to create a favorable patent position.”49

  In 1994 and 1995, researchers led by David Blumenthal at the Massachusetts General Hospital surveyed more than 3,000 academic researchers involved in the life sciences and found that 64 percent of their respondents reported having some sort of financial relationship with industry. They also found that scientists with industry relationships were more likely to delay or withhold publication of their data. Their study, published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that during the three years prior to the survey, 20 percent of researchers reported delaying publication of their research results for more than six months. The reasons cited for delaying publication included the desire to patent applications from their discovery and a desire by some researchers to “slow the dissemination of undesired results.” The practice of withholding publication or refusing to share data with other scientists was particularly common among biotechnology researchers.50

  “It used to be that if you published you could ask about results, reagents—now you have these confidentiality agreements,” said Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Paul Berg, a professor of biochemistry at Stanford University. “Sometimes if you accept a grant from a company, you have to include a proviso that you won’t distribute anything except with its okay. It has a negative impact on science.”

  In 1996, Steven Rosenberg, chief of surgery at the U.S. National Cancer Institute, observed that secrecy in research “is underappreciated, and it’s holding back medical cancer research—it’s holding back my research.”

  First, Do No Harmful Publicity

  The problem of secrecy in science is particularly troubling when it involves conflicts of interest between a company’s marketing objectives and the public’s right to know. When research results are not to a sponsor’s liking, the company may use heavy-handed tactics to suppress them—even if doing so comes at the expense of public health and the common good.

  One such case came to light in 1997 regarding the work of Betty Dong, a researcher at the University of California. In the late 1980s, the Boots Pharmaceutical company took an interest in Dong’s work after she published a limited study which suggested that Synthroid, a thyroid medication manufactured by Boots, was superior to drugs produced by the company’s competitors. Boots offered $250,000 to finance a large-scale study that would confirm these preliminary findings. To the company’s dismay, however, the larger study, which Dong completed in 1990, contradicted her earlier findings and showed that Synthroid was no more effective than the cheaper drugs made by Boots’s competitors. What followed was a seven-year battle to discredit Dong and prevent publication of her work. The contract Dong and her university had signed with the company gave it exclusive access to the prepublished results of the study as well as final approval over whether it would ever be published. The study sat on the shelf for five years while Boots waged a campaign to discredit Dong and the study, bombarding the chancellor and other university officials with allegations of unethical conduct and quibbles over the study’s method, even though the company itself had previously approved the method. In 1994, Dong submitted a paper based on her work to the Journal of the American Medical Association. It was accepted for publication and already set in type when the company invoked its veto right, forcing her to withdraw it.51

  In 1995, Boots was purchased by Knoll Pharmaceutical, which continued to suppress Dong’s conclusions. While she remained unable to publish her own results, Knoll published a reinterpretation of her data under the authorship of Gilbert Mayor, a doctor employed by the company. Mayor published his reanalysis of Dong’s data without acknowledging her or her research associates, a practice that the Journal of the American Medical Association would later characterize as publishing “results hijacked from those who did the work.”52 After further legal battles and an exposé of Knoll’s heavy-handed tactics in the Wall Street Journal, Dong was finally allowed to publish her own version of the study in JAMA in 1997—nearly seven years after its completion. During those seven years, Boots/Knoll had used Synthroid’s claims of superiority to dominate the $600-million-per-year synthetic thyroid market. The publication of her work in JAMA prompted a class-action lawsuit on the part of Synthroid users who had been effectively duped into paying an estimated $365 million per year more than they needed for their medication. Knoll settled the lawsuit out of court for $98 million—a fraction of the extra profits it had made during the years it spent suppressing Dong’s study.53

  Another attempt to suppress research occurred in 1995, when liver specialist Nancy Olivieri at the University of Toronto wanted to warn patients about the toxic side effects of a drug she was testing. The Canadian drug giant Apotex, which was sponsoring the study in hopes of marketing the drug, told her to keep quiet, citing a nondisclosure agreement that she had signed. When Olivieri alerted her patients anyway and published her concerns in the New England Journal of Medicine, Apotex threatened her with legal action and she was fired from her hospital, a recipient of hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in research funding from Apotex.

  In 1997, David Kern, an occupational health expert at Brown University, discovered eight cases of a new, deadly lung disease among workers at a Microfibres, Inc., a manufacturer of finely cut nylon flock based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Microfibres tried to suppress Kern’s finding, citing a confidentiality agreement that h
e had signed at the time of an educational visit to the company more than a year before the start of his research. When Kern spoke out anyway, administrators at the hospital and university where he worked (a recipient of charitable contributions from Microfibres) insisted that he withdraw a previously submitted scientific communiqué about the disease outbreak and that he cease providing medical care to his patients who worked at the company. Kern’s program—the state’s only occupational health center—was subsequently closed, and his job was eliminated.54 Even more disturbing was the response of many of his research colleagues. “There were courageous folks who stood up for me, but most looked the other way,” he said. “I’m mightily discouraged by the failure of the community to do more.”55

  In 1999, JAMA editor Drummond Rennie complained that the influence of private funding on medical research has created “a race to the ethical bottom.” Known cases of suppression may be only the tip of the iceberg. “The behavior of universities and scientists is sad, shocking, and frightening,” Rennie said. “They are seduced by industry funding, and frightened that if they don’t go along with these gag orders, the money will go to less rigorous institutions.”56

  Beyond the problem of outright fraud and suppression, moreover, there is a larger and more pervasive problem: the systemwide bias that industry funding creates among researchers in commercially profitable fields. “Virtually every academic in biotechnology is involved in exploiting it commercially,” says Orville Chapman of the University of California at Los Angeles. “We’ve lost our credentials as unbiased on such subjects as cloning or the modification of living things, and we seem singularly reluctant to think it through.”57

  Predetermined Outcomes

  A host of techniques exist for manipulating research protocols to produce studies whose conclusions fit their sponsor’s predetermined interests. These techniques include adjusting the time of a study (so that toxic effects do not have time to emerge), subtle manipulations of target and control groups or dosage levels, and subjective interpretations of complex data. Often such methods stop short of outright fraud, but lead to predictable results. “Usually associations that sponsor research have a fairly good idea what the outcome will be, or they won’t fund it,” says Joseph Hotchkiss of Cornell University. In Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact in America, author Cynthia Crossen noted the striking correspondence between the results obtained through published research and the financial interests of its sponsors:The consistency of research support for the sponsor’s desired outcome intrigued Richard Davidson, a general internist and associate professor of medicine at the University of Florida. “It struck me that every time I read an article about a drug company study, it never found the company’s drug inferior to what it was being compared to,” Davidson says. He decided to test that impression by reviewing 107 published studies comparing a new drug against a traditional therapy. Davidson confirmed what he had suspected—studies of new drugs sponsored by drug companies were more likely to favor those drugs than studies supported by noncommercial entities. In not a single case was a drug or treatment manufactured by the sponsoring company found inferior to another company’s product.58