The Politics Of Scientific Research

[Jimbo]

LINK

The demise of a supposed major risk to public health might be expected to prompt celebration among medical experts and campaigners. Instead, they scrambled to condemn the study, its authors, its conclusions, and the journal that published them. The reaction came as no surprise to those who have tried to uncover the facts about passive smoking. More than any other health debate, the question of whether smokers kill others as well as themselves is engulfed in a smog of political correctness and dubious science.

Researchers who dissent from the party line face character assassination and the termination of grants. Those who report their findings are vilified as lackeys of the tobacco industry, and accused of professional misconduct (in 1998, campaigners tried to have this newspaper censured by the Press Complaints Commission for our reports on passive smoking.

Originally set up in 1959 by the American Cancer Society, who recruited 118,000 Californian adults into the study, the follow-up effort was long supported by taxes levied on cigarettes. In 1997 the funding was suddenly cut off. Prof Enstrom suspects that health officials in California just were not keen to fund research that might undermine the original BMJ studies.

Prof Enstrom, compelled to take tobacco industry money to complete the study, then found that journals were unwilling to publish his negative findings. He told The Telegraph: "One journal we tried had published three positive studies before, but despite getting a glowing referee's report on our work, they refused to accept it."

After the BMJ published it last week, he has been subjected to a barrage of criticism: "The whole process has been aggressive, vitriolic hate," he says.

Within hours of publication, he and his co-author Dr Geoffrey Kabat, of the State University of New York, came under attack by the very organisation that had set up his study: the American Cancer Society. "We are appalled that the tobacco industry has succeeded in giving visibility to a study with so many problems," said a spokesman, adding that the study was "neither reliable nor independent".

But, Prof Enstrom said, the speed of the society's response to the negative findings is particularly revealing. "They wrote the complaint before they even saw the paper," he said.

In the UK, the anti-smoking pressure group Ash accused Prof Enstrom and his colleague of "deliberately downplaying the findings to suit their tobacco paymasters". But Prof Enstrom says they were subjected to rigorous peer review, and denies tobacco industry influence.

The denial appears to have satisfied the BMJ. Dr Richard Smith, the journal's editor, told The Telegraph that the decision to publish the findings was made only after they had been thoroughly refereed, and full disclosure made of the source of funding. "This is a big study with very complete follow-up about an important question," Dr Smith said. "I take the view that not to publish is a form of scientific misconduct."

I would think that people would be happy to know that there is one less thing that would kill you out in the world. Why does there seem to be this emotional attachment to this subject?

 

[HomeBrewerDude]

I would not infer nothing from that article or from the study it cites without first reading either the study, or a rigorous review of it. Studies like that are very sensitive to procedural and statistical methods.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

There are egos involved, but remember this is one study. That means that it needs to be torn apart and repeated. Then we can talk about the "demise" of the problem. This does not eliminate second hand smoke as a problem though, as many in the medical and scientific community were more worried about effects on children, which this study curiously omits, and other health problems such as asthma and allergies. If it doesnt cause cancer in adults, thats great! Let's look at it again and see.

 

[ElFenix]

there was another study buried last fall by WHO that had similar findings

 

[Jimbo]

Originally posted by: Hayabusarider
There are egos involved, but remember this is one study. That means that it needs to be torn apart and repeated. Then we can talk about the "demise" of the problem. This does not eliminate second hand smoke as a problem though, as many in the medical and scientific community were more worried about effects on children, which this study curiously omits, and other health problems such as asthma and allergies. If it doesnt cause cancer in adults, thats great! Let's look at it again and see.

Agreed, I think that we should research the hell out of this to get to the truth.
But, this is also NOT the first study that leads to the conclusion that this may very well be a bogus issue, or at the very least grossly overstated.

It looks like further research might be difficult to do because of some pretty organized resistance to PREVENT that from happening. According to the article, that money tends to get denied to the researchers who want to do that science and the results are hard to get published after the study is done if the results are different to "conventional wisdom".
Who needs that kind of hassle?

 

[sandorski]

Part of the problem is the muddled relationship between science and Industry/Special Interest with agendas. Those with agendas don't give a damn what "science" says, so they come up with "science" to support their agenda, because "science" has proven itself to be legitimate.

I don't know if such a murky situation can be resolved, since those with agendas will always find a way to muck things up, but a good start would be fund scientists in some kind of blindtrust. The scientist(s) wouldn't know who was funding them, those funding them would never know what the scientist or which scientist was researching their issue(s). The problem with such a system would be that Industry and Special Interest would likely not want to fund such a system, so it would require Public Funding. Then of course the Agendaites would be around the Public Funding Officials like buzzards at roadkill.

Until Society can find a way to differentiate(or gaurantee a difference) between Interest and Truth I think we'll continue to have this conversation on a wide range of issues.