Geoff Burlin wrote:
Frankly, I feel that the argument that corporations or businesses buy experts to support their POV all of the time has gotten worn to being threadbare. No inteligent professional is going to sell her/his credibility for a paycheck; what they are going to do is find an employer whose POV most matches their own. Much in the fashion no one who has doubts about the infallibility of the Pope will become a Jesuit. To ignore this is to promote an _ad hominem_ attack in disguise.
It's true that funding doesn't usually _create_ bias, as Geoff says. Mostly what it does is _select_ and _amplify_ bias. However, that's bad enough. A good example is the case of fen-phen, the diet drug that was taken off the market after it was linked to heart valve damage and other serious health problems in people who took it. Wyeth-Ayerst marketed fen-phen through a company called Excerpta Medica, which got paid $20,000 for each "scientific paper" that it placed in medical journals promoting the drug. Excerpta then hired ghostwriters to write the papers, and after they were written paid respected university professors $1,000 to "edit" the articles prior to publication. When the articles appeared in medical journals, the name-brand professors were the ones listed as the authors of the studies, and the ghostwriters' names didn't appear. After Wyeth-Ayerst got sued by people whose health had been destroyed by the drug, some of the name-brand professors got called as witnesses, and in court they said that they didn't even know Wyeth-Ayerst was paying for the studies; they thought they were simply being hired to do some light editing on the side for Excerpta. They didn't see themselves as "selling their credibility for a paycheck," but they obviously didn't give much scrutiny to the articles either, yet they didn't mind having their names appear as lead authors.
For even more egregious examples where "intelligent professionals" clearly _did_ sell their credibility for a paycheck, look at the tobacco industry's activities, which are extensive and notorious. In one of my books, I wrote about the case of Gary Huber, who "built a career for himself as one of the contrarian scientists who regularly disputed the growing body of scientific evidence about tobacco's deadly effects. Over the years, he received more than $7 million in tobacco industry research funding, and although his reputation as a 'tobacco whore' cost him the nrespect of friends and colleagues, in industry circles he was something of a star, hobnobbing with top executives, fishing with senior attorneys and participating in legal strategy sessions."
After my co-author and I submitted that passage to our editor, he objected that we shouldn't be calling the guy a "tobacco whore" and advised us to find a more polite phrase. We responded by sending him documents in which Huber himself talks about his work for the industry. A few years ago he had a change of heart and now testifies as an expert witness _against_ the industry in tobacco liability lawsuits. When asked the reasons for his change of heart, he pointed to two events: the death of his own father from tobacco-related cancer, and the advice of his daughter to dissociate himself from the tobacco industry. Her exact words were, "Dad, you've got to be careful. These guys are pimping you."
We pointed out to our editor that if the guy's own daughter thought he was being "pimped" by the tobacco industry, we were certainly justified in saying he had a reputation as a tobacco "whore." The editor agreed, and the passage was published as we originally wrote it.
I think the point Geoff is trying to make is that someone's source of research funding isn't in and of itself proof that their research is invalid. If that's his point, I agree with it. However, there is plenty of evidence showing that research funding correlates positively with bias, and for that reason funding should always be publicly disclosed.