In science, follow the money – if you can
By Paul D. Thacker & Curt Furberg,
The Los Angeles Times
| 05. 12. 2016
Untitled Document
In science as in politics, most people agree that transparency is essential. Top journals now require authors to disclose their funding sources so that readers can judge the possibility of bias, and the British Medical Journal recently required authors to disclose their data as well so that experts can run independent analyses of the results. But as transparency becomes the standard, many academics are resisting the trend without pushback from their universities.
After researcher Wei-Hock Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics was caught taking money from fossil fuel companies while claiming that climate change is not happening, the Smithsonian Institution revised its disclosure rules this April. Days later, Soon received $65,000 from Donors Trust, an organization that funnels anonymous contributions to conservative causes. According to the Guardian newspaper, Donors Trust has dispensed nearly $120 million to more than 100 groups casting doubt on climate science. Harvard-Smithsonian declined to explain why Soon received the money, and said that simply acknowledging his ties to Donors Trust allows Soon to meet ethical standards.
It's not hard to find examples of...
Related Articles
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...
By Elizabeth Chuck, NBC News | 07.09.2024
A Netflix docuseries has put a spotlight on the unregulated world of sperm donation, particularly the lack of stopgap measures that might prevent donors who have been banned by one country from simply going elsewhere to donate more.
Released earlier...
By Amanda Becker and Shefali Luthra, The 19th | 07.08.2024
Image by Duke University Archives from Flickr
Republicans have adopted a slate of policy positions ahead of next week’s convention that does not call for a federal legislative abortion ban, but opens the door to establishing fetal personhood.
The Republican...
By Isabelle Bartram
| 07.17.2024
Image by Kuzzat Altay from Unsplash
Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority in China, are mainly located in the autonomous region of Xinjiang. The Chinese government has pursued an aggressive settlement policy in this region since 1949, with the percentage of Han Chinese in the region increasing from five to forty percent in the second half of the 20th century. Since 2014, the Uyghurs have been subject to persecution and re-education – various sources have estimated that at least one million...