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First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, … for the Jews, …
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.
While we continue to be interested in analyses of ways of reducing tobacco use, we will no longer be considering papers where support, in whole or in part, for the study or the researchers comes from a tobacco company.
As good a [bias] case can be made … against tobacco industry funding. How many anti-tobacco public health researchers would be able to continue getting grants from Ministries of Health if their research found that smoking isn’t as bad as the Ministry might have thought?
Many scientists, journal editors and journalists see themselves as a sort of priestly class untainted by commerce. … This snobbery was codified by the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2005, when it … refused to publish such work unless there was at least one author with no ties to the industry who would formally vouch for the data. That policy … looked especially dubious after a team of academic researchers (not financed by industry) analyzed dozens of large-scale clinical trials in previous decades and reported that industry-sponsored ones met significantly higher standards than the nonindustry ones.
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As Gary Taubes nicely illustrates in his book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” scientists who disagreed with the accepted wisdom on the evils of fat in the diet were accused of being corrupted by industry grants even if they had received most of their money from government agencies that were looking — unsuccessfully — for evidence to back the fat-is-bad theory. Meanwhile, scientists who went along with the conventional wisdom on fat weren’t criticized for the corporate money they’d received from food companies.
Mr. Taubes has also found some wonderful examples of selective journalism in the dispute over sugar’s health effect: An article stressing the harms of sugar would make dissenting scientists look bad by stressing their connections to the sugar industry, whereas an article exonerating sugar would make the other side’s scientists look bad by stressing the money they received from companies making sugar substitutes. …
“Scientists were believed to be free of conflicts if their only source of funding was a federal agency, but all nutritionists knew that if their research failed to support the government position on a particular subject, the funding would go instead to someone whose research did.” … Not-for-profit advocacy groups … “are rarely if ever accused of conflicts of interest, even though their entire reason for existence is to argue one side of a controversy as though it were indisputable.”
If the new principle is that we mustn’t publish research not funded by groups committed to proving our official beliefs, how long before “our” beliefs exclude yours? How long before interdisciplinary journals like Science or Nature refuse to publish papers by economists, known for their suspiciously right-wing leanings, unless non-economist co-authors vouch for them? Do you really think that can’t happen?
Only Trust Us
Quoting Martin Niemoller is something that should be done warily. "They" - in the sense of the government - first came for the Communists in 1919, and lots of people spoke out. They even took to the streets and seized the government. If the Spartacist uprising in Berlin failed, that did not prevent the Communists and the Socialists from being the political majority until 1933. Niemoller ignores this inconvenient truth in his poem because he himself did "speak out" during this post-war period in Germany, but his speeches were against the Marxist Left and for the National Socialists. Niemoller was an early supporter of the Nazis, and so were many of the trade unions, whom the Nazis did not, in fact, "come for" at all. Hitler acknowledges that fact in Mein Kampf: "As things stand today, the trade unions in my opinion cannot be dispensed with. On the contrary, they are among the most important institutions of the nation's economic life. Their significance lies not only in the social and political field, but even more in the general field of national politics." Niemoller's actual quarrel with the Nazis only came when the National Socialists decided that Protestant and Catholic Churches should once again become part of a State Church. This was not, in itself, a dramatic departure from pre-WW I Germany practice where each regional church, whether Catholic or Protestants, depending on which was the majority religion - received subsidies form the government and were ruled by a regnal house that was part of the government. The greatest of all the dishonesties of this bold declaration of opposition is that it needed several revisions before it deigned to include the Jews. In his 1946 radio broadcast of his poem, Niemoller did not even mention the Jews. It is only in the English republication in the 1950s in the United States that they were added to the list of sanctified victims.
I think this Eisenhower quote is apropos:
"Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present -- and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. "