I’ve been meaning to mention this important article in The New York Times from a few weeks ago by Aaron E. Carroll regarding the use of private sector mechanisms to protect the future profits of private sector corporations from the findings of science sector entities.
That is, corporations whose products are found to be ineffective – or worse – suing scientific researchers for publishing findings that negatively impact the prospects of corporations’ products:
We have a dispiriting shortage of high-quality health research for many reasons, including the fact that it’s expensive, difficult and time-intensive. But one reason is more insidious: Sometimes groups seek to intimidate and threaten scientists, scaring them off promising work.
By the time I wrote about the health effects of lead almost two years ago, few were questioning the science on this issue. But that has not always been the case. In the 1980s, various interests tried to suppress the work of Dr. Herbert Needleman and his colleagues on the effects of lead exposure. Not happy with Dr. Needleman’s findings, the lead industry got both the federal Office for Scientific Integrity and the University of Pittsburgh to conduct intrusive investigations into his work and character. He was eventually vindicated — and his discoveries would go on to improve the lives of children all over the country — but it was a terrible experience for him.
I often complain about a lack of solid evidence on guns’ relationship to public health. There’s a reason for that deficiency. In the 1990s, when health services researchers produced work on the dangers posed by firearms, those who disagreed with the results tried to have the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control shut down. They failed, but getting such work funded became nearly impossible after that.
In case it’s not apparent, the problem here is that the goal of the researchers is knowledge, while the goal of the corporations is profit. These goals need not always clash, but they often do, and when the morality of the corporation – to the extent that it can have a morality – conforms to the popular, if incorrect, idea that profits are all, then there’s going to be problems.
I view it as a problem of making truth a secondary item, which is always disappointing for me, and I think is a primary cause of many problems American society experiences.
So what to do about it? Aaron mentions anti-SLAPP laws, but in at least one case …
But in Dr. Cohen’s case, the court refused to give full weight to Massachusetts’ anti-Slapp statute on the ground that dismissing the case would undermine the supplement company’s constitutional right to a jury trial.
Perhaps rather than preventing lawsuits, they should impose a penalty on the entity bringing the lawsuit if it’s found to be specious, or if the entity does not show a sufficient loyalty to the idea of a proper scientific conclusion and its willingness to abandon a product which is ineffectual or may even result in harm to the consumer.
I dunno. I can’t imagine that an effective law could really be constructed around such an idea, to be honest. It’s one thing to have an intuitive notion of a good law, and quite another to construct such a law that would withstand constitutional challenge. Part of the problem is the difficulty of constructing an objective definition of the various concepts involved, and along with that is the problem that society doesn’t really recognize our various sectors very well. You can see it a little bit, such as the tax-sheltered status of non-profit organizations, but it’s not well developed, and I have no idea how to develop it more thoroughly, even if I was in a position to do so.
