This book reveals in graphic detail how government control over the scientific enterprise, which President Dwight D. Eisenhower predicted would eventually pose a grave threat to America’s future, has finally come to pass. It also builds upon the prolific work of authors Daniel Greenberg, Sheldon Krimsky, David Michaels, and others.
The American silver plug penny minted in the 1790s proclaims liberty as the parent of science and industry. The founding fathers were convinced that freedom from corruption was vital both to a healthy economy and to scientific progress.1 Few people today would disagree, and recent, highly publicized events surrounding the collapse of the housing market, corporate fraud, and the dire need for campaign finance reform have made the public well aware of the alarming influence that corrupt special interests have gained over the political process in the last several decades. While their insidious effects on the economy are well documented, most people have only had a glimpse of their impact on science.
During my thirty-plus years as a research microbiologist in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development (ORD) and at the University of Georgia, I experienced the far-reaching influence of corrupt special interests firsthand. As this book will describe, my dealings with civil servants, corporate managers, elected officials, and other scientists expose the ease—and disturbing regularity—with which a small group of individuals, motivated by profit or personal advancement, can completely hijack important areas of research science at even our most trusted institutions. The result is that today, many government-funded scientific endeavors have become little more than an arm of industry marketing efforts and government policymakers.
Many factors lead to the ease with which the scientific process is corrupted by outside influences. Some are largely unavoidable. The complexity of the science itself often makes it so that only a tiny fraction of outside observers have the background knowledge to notice when the pieces don’t add up to a whole. On top of that, research is expensive, time-consuming, and inherently risky, making it hard for the small number of people who are able to understand any given area of research to unveil the corruption.
But the culture of our scientific institutions, and the priorities of many of their leaders, shares a lot of the blame. A 2008 survey of ORD’s scientists by the Cambridge-based Union of Concerned Scientists reflects what many of my colleagues have become accustomed to: researchers are systematically subjected to top-down pressure to avoid conducting research or drawing conclusions that undermines government policies.2 In a great many cases, those who do are fired, have their careers dead-ended, and are sometimes even prosecuted and imprisoned. These problems are mirrored in industry, which hires scientists to support its business. And they have spread to universities, which are heavily invested in obtaining grants that ultimately support government policies and industry practices.
If the trend continues, integrity in science may one day become about as rare as a silver plug penny. Unfortunately, organizations dealing with scientific misconduct are designed only to weed out those who commit fraud behind the backs of the institutions where they work. But the greatest threat of all is the purposeful corruption of the scientific enterprise by leaders within the institutions themselves. The science they create is often only an illusion, designed to deceive, and the scientists they destroy to protect that illusion are often our best.
Throughout my career as a research scientist, I’ve worked in areas where policymakers and industrial managers have a keen interest in controlling what gets published in the scientific literature. I have watched government officials, university administrators, and corporate executives manipulate science without restraint time after time to advance and protect their own interests, funding scientists to carry out research projects with predetermined outcomes, fudging data, and using false allegations of research misconduct to eliminate scientists who question their “science.”
Since 1996, I’ve spent much of my time fighting governmental, industrial, and academic entities jointly engaged in efforts to stop my research and discredit my coauthors and me by any means necessary. This book describes the most important issues that my coauthors and I have investigated, along with important research topics that leaders at government agencies and in the corporate world have prevented me from ever undertaking. Along the way, I’ve discovered much about the methods that are sometimes used within government agencies, corporations, and academic institutions to manipulate science.
My coauthors and I, for example, were the first researchers to document adverse health effects associated with treated sewage sludges (biosolids) applied according to EPA’s current regulation, the 503 sludge rule. This rule allows municipalities to collect industrial pollutants at wastewater treatment plants and spread them on farms, forests, school playgrounds, and other public and private lands without monitoring any pollutants other than nine metals and two nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorus.
EPA’s attempts to stop our research and discredit the researchers with false allegations of research misconduct prompted two congressional hearings by the House Science Committee, a review by the National Academy of Sciences, and the passage by Congress of the No Fear Act of 2002. At first, Democrats in the House of Representatives refused to support efforts to clean up the scientific fraud and the silencing of concerned scientists behind EPA’s biosolids program, choosing instead to cast Republicans as anti-environmental for attacking EPA regulations.3 Then, as a Senate Briefing was scheduled, Republicans torpedoed that effort.4
Similarly, I spent almost two years obtaining and analyzing the U.K. General Medical Council’s (GMC’s) confidential documents behind allegations of research misconduct that Brian Deer and the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published against Dr. Andrew Wakefield. In the process, I discovered a document showing that the analysis of patient records that Deer published in 2010 perfectly matches an analysis requested by the government’s lawyers in the GMC proceedings four years earlier. The analysis, which Deer published in the BMJ, was the result of a deliberate plan by individuals working for the British government to conflate a blinded expert analysis of biopsy slides with routine pathology reports to make it appear that Wakefield had misinterpreted the records to link the MMR vaccine to autism. What the government’s lawyers could probably never get away with in the courtroom—which was to condemn Andrew Wakefield for research fraud—Deer accomplished by publishing the government’s convoluted analysis in the BMJ.
My hope is that this book will give our judicial system, the news media, and the general public a better idea of what goes on behind the scenes, where enormous resources are being invested to create the illusion of science needed to protect government policies and industry practices. Somehow, we must find a way to prevent this illusion from supplanting the real science that is desperately needed to protect public health and the environment. It is up to us to ensure that future generations do not pay the price for the institutional research misconduct that has become such a large part of science during our generation.