“Hey, hey, you, you, get off of my cloud.” …. Jagger & Richards
For the last 50 years, critics, cranks, and anti-industry zealots have argued that industry-sponsored science is vitiated by conflicts of interest. What started as the whining of scientists who were regulatory “political scientists” and adjuncts to plaintiffs’ law firms, has become a major movement. The rise of post-modernism in philosophy has supported the rejection of robust debate of scientific assessments of causation on grounds that all such judgments are politically and socially determined. Evidence is just casuistry, at least when done by those with whom we disagree.
The anti-industry bias has had demonstrably bad consequences in distorting scientific judgment. Over 30 years ago, a science journalist published a story in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, about how dire predictions of asbestos mortality never came to pass.[1] In investigating the failure of these predictions, the journalist concluded that they had been the product of exaggerations by government scientists who suffered from a form of “white-hat” bias”:
“the government’s exaggeration of the asbestos danger reflects a 1970s’ Zeitgeist that developed partly in response to revelations of industry misdeeds. ‘It was sort of the “in” thing to exaggerate … [because] that would be good for the environmental movement’…. ‘At the time it looked like you were wearing a white hat if you made these wild estimates. But I wasn’t sure whoever did that was doing all that much good.”[2]
The existence of “white-hat” bias is perhaps the most benign explanation for the propagation of badly done science. The deployment of political correctness applied to issues that really depend upon scientific method, data, and inference for their resolution should not, however, be seen as particularly benign.
In 2010, over a decade after the description of white-hat bias in the JNCI, two public health researchers, Mark B. Cope and David B. Allisosn, described white-hat bias as a prevalent cognitive error in how research is reported and interpreted.[3] They described white-hat bias as a “bias leading to the distortion of information in the service of what may be perceived to be righteous ends.” Perhaps the temptation to overstate the evidence against a toxic substance is unavoidable, but it diminishes the authority and credibility of regulators entrusted with promulgating and enforcing protective measures. And error is still error, regardless of its origins and motivations.
Allison and Cope gave examples of white-hat bias in how papers are cited, with “exonerative” studies cited less often than those than claim harmful outcomes. And when positive papers were cited, they were often interpreted misleadingly to overstate the harms previously reported.
The principle of charity suggests white-hat bias should be considered for much of the anti-industry prejudices exhibited by public health scientists. The persistence, virulence, and irrationality of many instances of prejudiced judgments, however, make the charitable explanation implausible.
Kenneth Rothman, the founder of Epidemiology, the official journal of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE), provided a more insightful explanation to the anti-industry bias as the “new McCarthyism in science.”[4] Rothman identified an anti-manufacturing industry bias as manifesting as intolerance toward industry-sponsored studies, and strict scrutiny of “conflict-of-interest” (COI) disclosures. The McCarthyites amplify the gamesmanship over COI disclosures by excusing or justifying non-disclosure of COIs from scientists aligned with advocacy groups or the lawsuit industry, or from positional COIs.
The quaint notion that “an opinion should be evaluated on the basis of its contents, not on the interests or credentials of the individuals who hold it,” has been generally banished.[5] The offense to honest scientific inquiry receives little attention,[6] but the sanctimonious deployment of COI claims allows scientists to over-indulge in poor quality research by claiming that they have extirpated industry influence.
In 1995, anti-tobacco historian and expert witness, Robert Proctor, coined the term agnotology from the Greek ágnosis (“not knowing”) and -logia (study of).[7] Agnotology is now a specialty of scientist-advocates and expert witnesses for the lawsuit industry; it has been the subject of numerous and repetitive books,[8] too many articles to cite, and even doctoral dissertations.[9]
The anti-manufacturing industry jihad is little more than defamation against every scientist or citizen who has called for evidence-based regulation and law in dealing with scientific issues. The movement would deprive legislators, regulators, and juries of important, relevant scientific evidence based upon a smear.
What is truly fascinating, however, is the hypocrisy built into the anti-industry COI movement. There is another industry that is protected from criticism – the lawsuit industry. The lawsuit industry that has grown up parasitically around a system of tort law, which now includes not only law firms that service claimants, but also their retinue of expert witnesses, their litigation funders, and even investment firms that collude with hit-piece journalists who work on “distort and short” schemes of trading in the securities of their targets.
The critics of research done or funded by manufacturing industry argue that industry studies disproportionately report outcomes favorable to their sponsors. The implied potential conflicts posed by industry-sponsored research studies are fairly obvious. Industries that make or sell products, raw materials, or chemicals have an interest in having toxicological and epidemiologic studies support claims of safety. Research that suggests an industry’s product causes harm may hurt the industry’s financial interests directly by inhibiting sales, or indirectly by undermining the industry’s position in litigation, or by leading to greater regulatory scrutiny and control. Indirect harms may result from heightened warnings or instructions, which may limit sales or encourage sales of competing, less hazardous products. If the harm evidenced by the research is sufficiently severe, the research may lead to product recall or bans, again with serious economic consequences for the industry.
The lawsuit industry has conflicts of interest that mirror those of manufacturing industry.[10] Manufacturing evidence and conclusions of harm is good for the lawsuit industry, and provides rich sources of revenue for its go-to expert witnesses. There are also ideological interests that motivate many players in the lawsuit industry. Lawsuit industry COIs are frequently ignored or down-played, even though the research funded, sponsored, or written by its members has a strange propensity to support claims made in court and in agencies.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has become ground zero for hypocritical exorcisms of COIs. In 2018, several authors wrote a commentary in which they declared that IARC and its cancer hazard evaluations were under attack from those with “economic interests” (manufacturing firms or their consultants).[11] Several of the commentary authors, Peter F. Infante, Ronald Melnick, and James Huff, were full-fledged members of the lawsuit industry, with consulting firms that work to help claimants in tort litigation. The authors’ own COIs, however, did not inhibit them from declaring that only “scientific experts who do not have conflicts of interest should be allowed to criticize IARC pronouncements. Three of the four authors (Infante, Melnick, Huff) of this hit piece identified themselves as having consulting firms, but only James Huff gave a disclosure that he had “been retained as expert consultant on long-term animal bioassays of glyphosate in litigation for plaintiffs.” Infante and Melnick gave no disclosure, although they have been far more than consultants; they have appeared in testimonial roles for tort claimants. To top off the hypocrisy, the journal editor, Steven B. Markowitz, felt compelled to declare that he had “no conflict of interest in the review and publication decision regarding this article.” Markowitz is a not infrequent testifying expert witness for the lawsuit industry.[12] It is a safe bet that the great majority of the studies authored by Infante, Melnick, Huff, and Markowitz claim or suggest harms from chemical exposures.
It seems rudimentary that scientific research should be evaluated on the merits of studies, methods, data, and inference, and not the source of the funding. We are, however, deep into the post-modern world that regards science as a way of exercising political power and social control, and not a search for the truth. Given our Zeitgeist, no one should be surprised that an IARC official has just come out with a paper that attempted to deploy a large-language model (LLM) to identify possible industry influence, down to parts per trillion or whatever the level of detection may be.
Last month, Mary K. Schubauer-Berigan, the head of the Evidence Synthesis and Classification Branch of IARC, along with several other scientists, published a paper that proposed the use of an LLM to identify industry influence.[13] Schubauer-Berigan is an occupational epidemiologist, but she is also an amateur agnotologist. The first sentence of her article really tells all you need to know: “Industry-funded research poses a threat to the validity of scientific inference on carcinogenic hazards.” The authors claim that their LLM can help assess bias from industry studies in evidence synthesis and identify “industry influence” on scientific inference. These authors reflect the IARC dogma that only manufacturing industry has COIs of concern. Lawsuit industry influence is never mentioned.
The authors applied their LLM to identify industry relationships among authors of review articles on issues related to three specific IARC hazard classifications (benzene, cobalt, and aspartame). The search apparently included direct funding for studies of the agent under consideration, as well as whether studies or reviews had an industrial sponsor or a trade association, whether they used data provided by an industry source, or whether authors were paid consulting fees or provided expert testimony. The authors’ algorithm did not include whether spouses, children, parents, good friends, professional colleagues, or mentors ever had some dalliance with manufacturing industry.
IARC’s LLM was never let loose in search of lawsuit industry connections. Are you surprised?
[1] Tom Reynolds, “Asbestos-Linked Cancer Rates Up Less Than Predicted,” 84 J. Nat’l Cancer Instit. 560 (1992).
[2] Id. at 562.
[3] Mark B. Cope and David B. Allison, “White hat bias: examples of its presence in obesity research and a call for renewed commitment to faithfulness in research reporting,” 34 Internat’l J. Obesity 84 (2010).
[4] Kenneth J. Rothman, “Conflict of interest: the new McCarthyism in science,” 269 J. Am. Med. Ass’n 2782 (1993). See Schachtman, “The Rhetoric and Challenge of Conflicts of Interest,” Tortini (July 30, 2013).
[5] Brian MacMahon, “Epidemiology: another perspective,” 37 Internat’l J. Epidem. 1192, 1192 (2008).
[6] See Thomas P. Stossel, “Has the hunt for conflicts of interest gone too far?” 336 Brit. Med. J. 476 (2008); Kenneth J. Rothman & S. Evans, “Extra scrutiny for industry funded trials: JAMA’s demand for an additional hurdle is unfair – and absurd, 331 Brit. Med. J. 1350 (2005) & 332 Brit. Med. J. 151 (2006) (erratum).
[7] Robert Proctor, The Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don’t Know About Cancer 8 & not (1995).
[8] See, e.g., David Michaels, The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception (2020); David Michaels, Doubt Is Their Product: How Industrys Assault on Science Threatens Your Health (2008); Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (2010); Robert N. Proctor & Londa Schiebinger, eds., Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (2008); Janet Kourany & Martin Carrier, eds, Science and the Production of Ignorance: When the Quest for Knowledge Is Thwarted (2020); Blake D. Scott, “Agnotology and Argumentation: A Rhetorical Taxonomy of Not-Knowing,” OSSA Conference Archive 133 (2016).
[9] Craig Alex Biegel, Manufactured Science, the Attorneys’ Handmaiden: The Influence of Lawyers in Toxc [sic] Substance Disease Research, Dissertation for Florida State University (2016).
[10] See Laurence J. Hirsch, “Conflicts of Interest, Authorship, and Disclosures in Industry-Related Scientific Publications: The Tort Bar and Editorial Oversight of Medical Journals,” 84 Mayo Clin. Proc. 811 (2009).
[11] Peter F. Infante, Ronald Melnick, James Huff & Harri Vainio, “Commentary: IARC Monographs Program and public health under siege by corporate interests,” 61 Am J. Indus. Med. 277 (2018).
[12] See In re Joint Eastern & Southern District Asbestos Litig., 758 F.Supp. 199 (S.D.N.Y. 1991); Juni v. A.O. Smith Water Prods. Co., 32 N.Y.3d 1116, 116 N.E.3d 75 (2018); Konstantin v. 630 Third Avenue Assocs., N.Y.S.Ct. (N.Y. Cty.) No. 190134/2010 (jury verdict returned Aug. 17, 2011); Koeberle v. John Crane, Inc., Phila. Cty. Ct. C.P. No. 000887 (jury verdict returned Feb. 2010).
[13] Nathan L. DeBono, Vanessa Amar, Hardy Hardy, Mary K. Schubauer-Berigan, Derek Ruths & Nicholas B. King, “A large language model-based tool for identifying relationships to industry in research on the carcinogenicity of benzene, cobalt, and aspartame,” 24 Envt’l Health 64 (2025).
