The Reliability of Science – Part 2

Author

Ross Conrad
We beekeepers put a lot of faith in science, but that faith isn’t always well placed.

Last month we looked at the systemic problems inherent in something we beekeepers have all come to rely upon: science. This month we look at the ways in which businesses and corporations manipulate and falsify science.

Science has become a valuable brand for those who can control it. For many it has replaced religion as a source of reliable knowledge, and if you can represent your idea or product as based in science, you gain an automatic advantage over competitors. To the extent that competitors can be discredited as being ‘unscientific,’ their products, services or ideas can be dismissed without directly addressing the issues involved.

The corporate usurpation of science
It starts with the revolving door between the corporate world and government regulatory agencies where regulators do not need to receive envelopes stuffed with cash to do industries bidding. All too often regulatory administrators hired from industry are hesitant to come down hard on their former friends and colleagues potentially jeopardizing future job offerings from the very industries they are supposed to regulate. Government regulatory agencies whose decisions impact beekeeping on a regular basis (e.g. EPA, FDA and FCC) all suffer from the revolving door effect. Once installed in key administrative positions within these regulatory agencies, former and future industry insiders overrule the studied opinions of their staff scientists in favor of their corporate clientele.

The EPA for example has a long history of scientist whistleblowers coming forth to expose industry collusion, corruption, and the censoring of findings harmful to industry by agency officials. The most recent whistleblower revelations reveal the role EPA officials play in pressuring scientists to falsify new pesticide risk assessments in an effort to make dangerous chemicals appear safe and quickly approve them for commercial use. (Lerner 2022, Perkins 2021)

The operational independence of scientists influenced by corporate funding, and the perception of collusion, whether real or not, is an ongoing problem. While industry involvement in science does not automatically mean the science is compromised, too often that is the case. For example, long-time readers of Bee Culture are familiar with Colorado beekeeper Tom Theobald’s infamous revelation that an unpublished industry study that was scientifically meaningless, was never-the-less accepted by the EPA as “scientifically sound” and used to approve clothianidin treated seed. (Theobald 2010)

Scientific messaging and spin
Meanwhile, industry money influences science in numerous ways such as by causing researchers to change their rhetoric around issues. It can also influence administrators who often direct what research gets funded and what doesn’t, or what gets released and what gets buried. In the world of honey bee science, this can translate into pressure for researchers to talk more about varroa and less about pesticide issues.

Even the recent International Panel on Climate Change report acknowledges that our reaction to the climate crisis “was slowed by misinformation around climate science.” Consequently, many remediation and adaptation efforts are only in the planning phase when implementation is urgently needed.

Another common approach is to funnel industry messaging through celebrities who appear to be independent of industry and who carry a gloss of expertise and acclaim that gives them credibility with consumers, lawmakers, and regulators. In other cases scientists with opinions favorable to industry are financed to endorse products and positions despite weak scientific evidence. Great effort is expended to make these “experts” appear unbiased and unaffiliated with industry. What the public doesn’t know is that behind the scenes, corporations are often funding and collaborating closely with these very same professors and professionals who tout propaganda that serves industry interests. It’s all part of a strategy of spin that has been used so successfully by industries such as tobacco, soft drinks, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, fossil fuels and cell phones.

Corporations also habitually fund and support front-groups that appear independent and scientific but are really focused on spinning information to counter unfavorable press. Partner groups with neutral or science-y sounding names proliferate such as Academic’s Review, The American Council on Science and Health, the Genetic Literacy Project, International Food Information Council, Sense about Science and GMO Answers, allow industry insiders and pro-industry academics to play leadership roles in their organizations and write for their platforms. These groups seek to create an echo chamber all using similar messaging and often referring back to each other as sources. While casting themselves as honest arbiters of science, they spread false information and level attacks against honest hard-working independent scientists who raised concerns detrimental to corporate interests. In the pseudo-scientific world, as in politics, when you can’t best your opponent with the facts and reasoned logic, you attack them personally and seek to discredit them so their ideas or work is summarily dismissed due to association and not content. This has led to an “anti-science movement” that organizes and funds rejection of science and refutation of scientific principles and methods in favor of alternative views, often linked to the targeting and harassment of individual scientists.

Meanwhile, lawmakers who could influence regulation don’t due to reliance on corporate largess through the legalized system of bribery we call campaign contributions. Politicians that have enough backbone to resist corporate money then have to face opposition candidates financed by deep pocketed industries.

Science reflects upon itself
The proliferation of compromised science appears to have become endemic. I have noticed that the overwhelming number of studies that find little-to-no-harm to bees from exposure to neonicotinoid pesticides have industry involvement, while most of the independently conducted studies raise serious concerns about neonics impact on pollinators. When European researchers analyzed how funding sources influenced scientific conclusions on the possible health effects of cell phone usage, they looked at privately funded, publically funded and studies funded through mixed sponsorship. It was the industry funded studies that were least likely to report statistically significant results. (Huss 2007)

In 2012 when a group of researchers looked at 2,047 scientific articles that were retracted by a single publisher: PubMed, they found that only 21.3% were attributed to error. In contrast, 67.4% of retractions were because of misconduct which included fraud or suspected fraud (43.4%), duplicate publication (14.2%), and plagiarism (9.8%). The percentage of scientific articles that had to be retracted because of fraud had increased ∼10-fold since 1975 (Ferric et. al. 2012). More recently, studies have found that just over 65% of research paper retractions can be solely attributed to scientific misconduct. (Campos-Varela & Ruano-Raviña 2019; Mousavi & Abdollahi 2020)

Moving forward
To preserve the scientific establishment against the forces that would allow it to be manipulated to the benefit of industry or politics, society would do well to install firewalls between academic science and the corporate sector while educating young scientists and journal editors on the moral and ethical principles behind their respective professional roles. The institutional dependency on industry money that extends from policy makers, political candidates, congressmen and legislators, as well as scientific researchers and academic organizations needs to stop. Policy makers must not allow corporate-spun and funded science to guide decisions and the media needs to do a better job reporting and probing the conflicts of interest behind corporate science spin.

Science can be powerful and extremely useful, but systematic fakery and corruption has undermined trust in science and the capacity of individuals such as beekeepers to make informed evidence-based choices. In the eyes of the public, the tainting of science by corporate finances spills over into the questioning of legitimate science that is conducted with integrity. Scientific misconduct has even been shown to negatively impact the careers of honest scientists who are unlucky enough to co-author papers with colleagues that play fast and loose with ethical considerations. (Mongeon & Lariviere 2014)

While much has been said recently about science denial being driven by social media and the psychology of groups, this appears to simply be a symptom of the problem. The evidence suggests that the underlying cause of science denial is sowed by society’s reliance on corporate financing that pressures scientists to falsify their work for personal gain and empowers corporations to manipulate science and its dissemination to favorably present their products and services for profits. The endemic nature of misbehavior within the realm of science has become so widespread and common that it has led us to the point that a person who doesn’t like the results of a study, can simply state that it is “fake science” and many people will automatically believe them without looking into it for themselves.

One thing is clear: when it occurs, scientific misconduct overwhelmingly occurs when investigating ultra-high-profit industry activities. This is why pure honey bee research is rarely impacted. It is primarily in the fields where bee research intersects with things like pesticides, pollutants and electromagnetic radiation, that bee science appears most susceptible to fraud and manipulation. Thankfully the majority of science is still conducted with integrity, but it is wise to consider funding sources and industry involvement when evaluating the quality of what is reported.

Ross Conrad is the author of Natural Beekeeping: Organic approaches to modern apiculture, and co-author of The Land of Milk and Honey: A history of beekeeping in Vermont.

References:
Campos-Varela, Isabel & Ruano-Raviña, Alberto (2019) Misconduct as the main cause for retraction. A descriptive study of retracted publications and their authors, Gaceta Sanitaria 33(4):356-360
Ferric, C., Fang, R., Grant S, Casadevall, A. (2012) Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications, PNAS 109 (42) 17028-17033; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1212247109
Huss, A., Egger, M., Hug, K., Huwiler-Müntener, K., Röösli, M (2007) Source of funding and results of studies of health effects of mobile phone use: Systematic review of experimental studies, Environmental Health Perspectives 115(1):1-4
Lai, Henry (2022) Personal correspondence
Lerner, Sharon (2022) Documents reveal identities of thre EPA officials who downplayed chemical hazards, The Intercept, March 2, 2022
Mongeon, P. & Lariviere, V (2014) Costly collaborations: The impact of scientific fraud on co-author’s careers, Journal of the Association of Informed Science and Technology 67(3)
Mousavi, Taraneh, and Abdollahi, Mohammad (2020) A review of the current concerns about misconduct in medical sciences publications and the consequences, DARU Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences 28:359-369
Perkins, Tom (2021) EPA is falsifying risk assessments for dangerous chemicals, say whistleblowers, The Guardian, August 27, 2021.
Theobald, Tom (2010) Do we have a pesticide blowout?, Bee Culture July 2010, pp. 66-69 https://www.bouldercountybeekeepers.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/PesticideBlowOut.pdf