Conflicts of Interest in Science: Influence, Scandal and Denial

Written by Paul Thacker on November 30, 2023. Posted in Current News

In December 1953, the CEOs of America’s leading tobacco companies cast aside competitive rancor and gathered at New York City’s Plaza Hotel to confront a menace to their incredibly profitable industry

An emergent body of science published in elite medical journals cast doubt on the safety of cigarettes and threatened to destroy a half-century of corporate success.

Joining them at the Plaza was John W. Hill, the president of America’s top public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton. Hill would later prove a decisive savior.

Hill had closely studied Edward Bernays, whose work on propaganda in the 1920s and 1930s laid the foundation of modern public relations and defined common techniques to manipulate popular opinion.

Hill understood that any traditional campaign would fail to sway society, which perceived advertising as little more than corporate propaganda. Effective public relations required comprehensive off-stage management of the media. At its best, it left no fingerprints.

Instead of ignoring or denigrating new data that found tobacco dangerous, Hill proposed the opposite: embrace science, trumpet new data, and demand more, not less research.

By calling for more research, which they would then fund, tobacco companies could harness academic scientists in a battle to confront a major scientific controversy and amplify skeptical views of the relationship between tobacco and disease.

Such a scheme would let companies shroud themselves in doubt and uncertainty—core principles of the scientific process, in which every answer leads to new questions.

Hill & Knowlton’s campaign for the five largest US tobacco companies corrupted science and medicine for decades to follow, laying the foundation for financial conflicts of interest in science, as other industries mimicked tobacco’s techniques to protect their own products from government bans and regulations—later, from consumer lawsuits.

While tactics have varied over time, the core strategy has changed little since tobacco wrote the playbook, providing a menu of techniques now employed across industries.

To position themselves as more science than the science itself, corporations hire academics as advisors or speakers, appoint them to boards, fund university research, support vanity journals, and provide academic scholars with ghostwritten manuscripts to which they can add their names and publish in peer-reviewed journals with sometimes little or no effort.

These tactics create an alternative scientific realm that drowns out the voices of independent researchers and call into question the soundness of impartial data.

To further undermine impartial scientists, industries secretly support think tanks and corporate front groups. These organizations echo and amplify company studies and experts, counter articles in the media, and launch campaigns against independent academics, often trying to get their research retracted or perceived as second-rate and untrustworthy to the public and media.

To counter corporate influence, academic and government bodies have repeatedly turned to conflict of interest policies and calls for greater transparency and financial disclosure. Philip Handler, the President of the National Academies of Science (NAS) during the early 1970s, proposed the first conflicts of interest policy which the NAS Council approved in 1971.

The policy drew sharp rebukes from leading scientists who called it “insulting” and “undignified,” creating a pattern that continues today. Whenever a scandal erupts that finds companies exerting undue influence on science, calls for greater transparency and more stringent ethics requirements are countered with assertions that current rules are fine and further scrutiny is not needed.

However, a growing body of literature finds that arguments against financial conflicts of interest reforms are unsubstantiated, lacking in intellectual rigor, and ignorant of the peer-reviewed research on financial influence.

Although conflicts of interest policies have become more prevalent, their content and essential requirements have evolved little since the National Academies introduced their first rules.

In fact, the controversy over corporate control of science continues to dog the Academies. Over 40 years after introducing their first conflicts of interest policy, the Academies were once again caught in a scandal, after complaints that committee members preparing reports for the Academies have cozy ties to corporations.

Investigative reporters found that nearly half the members of a 2011 Academies report on pain management had ties to companies that manufacture narcotics, including opioids.

A separate newspaper investigation discovered that the NAS staff member who selected the committee members for a report on the regulation of the biotechnology industry was simultaneously applying to work for a biotech nonprofit.

Many of the committee members he chose were found to have undisclosed financial ties to biotech corporations. As this review of history will show, the Academy is not alone in confronting conflicts of interest in a cycle of denial, scandal, reform, and more denial.

Early Years

Concern over corporate influence on science is relatively modern, having emerged in the 1960s. In the early 20h century, private foundations and research institutes funded the vast majority of scientific research in the United States.

changed after World War II, when the national government began pouring increasing amounts of money into scientific programs. Physicist Paul E. Klopsteg best expressed the apprehension many scientists felt about the government controlling the research agenda.

As the Associate Director for Research at the National Science Foundation in 1955, he worried that federal funding for science could allow the government to hijack the mission of universities.

“Does such a vision make you uneasy?” Klopsteg asked, in a rhetorical fashion. “It should; for it requires scant imagination to picture therein a bureaucratic operation that would irresistibly and inevitably take a hand in the affairs of our institutions of higher learning.”

The government’s influence over science can be evaluated by examining budget numbers. From its first year of operations in 1952, the National Science Foundation’s budget ballooned from $3.5 million to almost $500 million in 1968.

The National Institutes of Health saw equally large increases, growing from $2.8 million in 1945 to over $1 billion in 1967. By 1960, the government supported over 60 percent of research.

During this period, the scientific community focused on conflicts of interest that affected scientists who either worked in government or who were funded by government agencies, especially researchers in military and space science research programs.

Even while using the term “conflict of interest,” scientists discussed the matter only within a narrow legal context.

When Congress held hearings about conflicts of interest in science, they concerned scientists who were government contractors for the Atomic Energy Commission or NASA while also having financial interests in private research or consulting companies.

Worries about government influence over science were also apparent in 1964. That year, both the American Council on Education and the American Association of University Professors developed conflicts of interest policies that only discussed research funded by the government.

By examining the appearance of the phrase “conflicts of interests” in the journal Science over the past century, we can see how the term has changed in context and meaning, reflecting researchers’ concerns about the power of external forces in shaping science. In the early years, the term surfaced in the journal’s pages in reference to scientists’ relations to government.

Over time, this shifted to incidents and discussions involving industry. This uneasiness with industry seems to have increased with time and with strengthening kinship between universities and corporate partners.

Tobacco Creates Parallel Science

After an initial meeting with tobacco company leaders in late 1953, Hill & Knowlton created a sophisticated strategy to shroud the emerging science about tobacco in skepticism.

Skeptics have always existed in science. In fact, skepticism is a fundamental value of science.

But tobacco repurposed skepticism by flooding the research field with money to study the relationship between smoking and disease, and positioning the industry as scientific advocates while shaping and amplifying a public message that tobacco’s potential dangers were an important scientific controversy.

Historian Allan M. Brandt of Harvard University noted, “Doubt, uncertainty, and the truism that there is more to know would become the industry’s collective new mantra.”

This Trojan Horse intrusion avoided many potential downfalls of a direct assault. Attacking researchers could backfire and be viewed as bullying; issuing statements of safety could be dismissed by a cynical public as self-serving, or worse, dishonest.

But emphasizing the need for more research allowed the tobacco industry to seize the moral high ground from which they could then peer down onto emerging data, gently guiding new research to spur a spurious debate. While pretending the goal was science, tobacco companies would repurpose research for public relations.

Public relation firms had decades of expertise at stage-managing the media to counter information that harmed their clients. But by controlling the research agenda and the scientific process, tobacco companies could manage journalists even better than in the past.

Instead of manipulating journalists to fight on their side of a public debate, companies would create the debate and then harness the media to publicize it for them.

As part of their initial plan, tobacco companies sought experts to discredit new research that might find links between tobacco and lung cancer. After companies collected public statements of physicians and scientists, Hill & Knowlton then produced a compendium of experts and their quotes.

Not content with just funding individual scientists and research projects, Hill proposed creating an industry-funded research center. This call for new research broadcasted a subtle message that current data was outdated or flawed, and by partnering with academic scientists and their universities, it created the impression that the tobacco industry was committed to finding the right answers.

“It is believed,” Hill wrote, “that the word ‘Research’ is needed in the name to give weight and added credence to the Committee’s statements.” By branding tobacco as a proponent of research, Hill made science the solution to possible government regulation. This strategy would lead to almost half a century of collusion between tobacco corporations and university researchers.

The Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC) became central to Hill & Knowlton’s strategy of co-opting academia. When TIRC was officially formed, over 400 newspapers ran an ad announcing the group with the title, “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers.”

The ad noted that tobacco had been accused of causing all sorts of human diseases, yet, “One by one those charges have been abandoned for lack of evidence.” The ads then pledged that companies would fund, on behalf of consumers, new research to study tobacco’s health effects:

We accept an interest in people’s health as a basic responsibility, paramount to every other consideration in our business.

We believe the products we make are not injurious to health. We always have and always will cooperate closely with those whose task it is to safeguard the public health.

The Executive Director of TIRC was W.T. Hoyt, a Hill & Knowlton employee, who operated TIRC from his firm’s New York office. Hoyt had no scientific experience, and before joining the PR firm, he sold advertising for the Saturday Evening Post.

The tobacco industry would later conclude “most of the TIRC research has been of a broad, basic nature not designed to specifically test the anti-cigarette theory.”

After retiring as CEO of Brown & Williamson, Timothy Hartnett became the first full-time chairman of TIRC. The statement announcing his appointment reads:

It is an obligation of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee at this time to remind the public of these essential points:

1. There is no conclusive scientific proof of a link between smoking and cancer.
2. Medical research points to many possible causes of cancer ….
3. A full evaluation of statistical studies now underway is impossible until these studies have completed, fully documented and exposed to scientific analysis through publication in accepted journals.
4. The millions of people who derive pleasure and satisfaction from smoking can be reassured that every scientific means will be used to get all the facts as soon as possible.

The TIRC began operating in 1954 and almost all of its $1 million budget was spent on fees to Hill & Knowlton, media ads, and administrative costs. Hill & Knowlton hand-picked TIRC’s science advisory board (SAB) of academic scientists who peer-reviewed grants which had been screened previously by TIRC staff.

& Knowlton favored scientists who were skeptics of tobacco’s ill health effects, especially skeptics who smoked.

Instead of delving into research about tobacco’s links to cancer, most of TIRC’s program focused on answering basic questions about cancer in areas such as immunology, genetics, cell biology, pharmacology, and virology.

The TIRC funding of universities helped chill discourse and debate that argued tobacco might cause disease, while also allowing tobacco companies the prestige of associating with academics, as few TIRC scientists took strong positions against tobacco.

While launching TIRC, Hill & Knowlton also moved to reshape the media environment by developing a large, systematically cross-referenced library on tobacco-related issues. As one Hill & Knowlton executive explained:

One policy that we have long followed is to let no major unwarranted attack go unanswered. And that we would make every effort to have an answer in the same day—not the next day or the next edition.

This calls for knowing what is going to come out both in publications and in meetings….This takes some doing. And it takes good contacts with the science writers.

Although their positions were not grounded in substantive peer-reviewed literature, Hill & Knowlton broadcast the opinions of a small group of skeptics on cigarette science, making it appear as if their views were dominant in medical research.

These skeptics allowed TIRC to quickly counter any assault against tobacco. In many cases, TIRC rebutted new findings even before they had become public. This campaign succeeded because it hijacked science journalists’ love of controversy and commitment to balance.

“Given the penchant of the press for controversy and its often naive notion of balance, these appeals were remarkably successful,” Brandt concluded.

Not satisfied with passive forms of media control like advertising and press releases, Hill & Knowlton practiced aggressive outreach to authors, editors, scientists, and other opinion makers. Personal face-to-face contacts were critical, and after every press release,

TIRC would initiate a “personal contact.” Hill & Knowlton systematically documented this courtship of newspapers and magazines to urge journalistic balance and fairness to the tobacco industry.

During these encounters, TIRC emphasized that the tobacco industry was committed to the health of cigarette smokers and scientific research, while urging skepticism about statistical studies finding harm.

Finally, TIRC presented journalists with contacts of “independent” skeptics to ensure accurate journalistic balance.

In short, after creating the controversy, Hill & Knowlton then co-opted reporters to cover the debate, leading to stories that concluded tobacco science was “unresolved.”

This is taken from a long document, read the rest here substack.com

Header image: The Conversation

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