Science, Hype and Profit: a Perilous Mix
An ever fiercer competition for research funds, burgeoning commercialism and a growing willingness by scientists to sidestep traditional checks and balances are undermining the quality of information the public receives about advances in science and medicine.
In the biological sciences, where research can lead to therapeutic advances that can generate millions of dollars, commercial pressures have brought on a troubling increase in conflicts of interest. In the physical sciences, findings of purported killer asteroids or fluffy comets bombarding the earth have been hyped in the news media before they underwent the usual expert scrutiny.
What both areas of science have in common is that the transmission of scientific information to the public--a matter of keen interest in our technological society--can be warped by changes in the way scientists carry out and report their work.
“This is a very serious problem,” said Rita Colwell, director of the National Science Foundation.
Alta Charo, a member of the U.S. National Bioethics Commission, agreed that the flow of scientific misinformation is eroding public confidence in society’s experts. “If public policy is going to be made, and especially if it is going to be made in a hurry,” Charo said, “you have to be absolutely sure of your facts.”
Consider the controversial diet drug Redux. Federal officials ordered Redux off the market in 1997 after reports linking it to heart problems in obese patients. Diet drugs such as Redux had been the subject of considerable research. But according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., researchers were far more likely to support the use of the drugs if they had a financial relationship with the drug’s manufacturer.
The corrosive impact of too many scientific announcements that are half-baked, ill-supported or premature undercuts efforts to keep laws and public policies up with the cutting edge of science, disrupting the effort to assess controversial developments such as cloning.
Perhaps most important, scientific misinformation feeds the pervasive--although incorrect--public belief that no line exists between what is universally accepted and what is merely speculation.
The formal enterprise of research has always been an open-ended conversation among scientists. That conversation takes the form of studies published every month in thousands of peer-reviewed journals and then echoed by newspapers, magazines, radio and television the world over.
Even at its best, that scientific discourse is often a confusing contest of conflicting claims, as theories are tested by experiment and new observations. Such debates, in which new facts perpetually overthrow old assumptions, are the heart of science.
Today, however, that conversation is being distorted.
“I think it’s very frightening,” said Geoffrey Marcy, an astronomer from San Francisco State who has 10 newly discovered planets under his belt. “We tread a thin line between communicating the true excitement of science and touting our own work when it isn’t quite polished or even plain wrong.”
Increasingly, scientists appear more willing to step over that line. Examples abound:
* A South Korean medical team claimed to have taken the first step toward human cloning when the researchers announced in December that they had combined a woman’s adult cell with one of her own eggs to create an embryo. But the work has not been reviewed by any medical journals, nor has it been confirmed by other scientists. The team promised to offer proof later.
* A Massachusetts biotechnology company renewed passionate congressional debate over the use of human embryos for research when its scientists announced last year that they had combined human embryo cells and animal cells for the first time. Despite the widespread attention at the time, the feat has yet to be confirmed, duplicated or detailed in any scientific journal.
* An Iowa physicist created a continuing international stir with his suggestion that Earth’s atmosphere is bombarded every day by thousands of fluffy snow comets--weighing up to 40 tons. Many experts say there is still no reliable evidence to support the claim.
* Tulane University scientists dropped an environmental bombshell when they announced in 1996 that small amounts of ordinary pesticides mixed together might be causing devastating increases in estrogen levels linked to breast cancer, birth defects and diminished sperm counts. But last year, with far less fanfare, they retracted their peer-reviewed paper when they could not replicate their own research findings.
Scientists worry about such unsupported claims and reversals in part because they fear that every highly touted discovery that is retracted, or that fades into obscurity, chips away at the public’s faith in science.
Currently, opinion surveys show that nearly half the public says it has “only some” confidence in the nation’s scientific community. Still, scientists continue to receive higher marks for integrity and trust than members of most other professions.
“The American public thinks the pronouncements of scientists are authoritative,” said Stanford University chemist Richard Zare. “We need to be very careful about breaking [the public’s] confidence.”
Said former White House science advisor John Gibbons: “It is a trust that you earn daily. It can be eroded.”
A Hierarchy of Scientific Journals
The research interests and professional concerns of particle physicists, quantum chemists and astronomers among the physical sciences often have little in common with the preoccupations of molecular biologists, clinical researchers or others in the life sciences.
But they all share a bedrock allegiance, at least in theory, to a system of checks and balances that for generations has ensured the integrity of their research.
Until recently, virtually all scientific information that reached the public eye came stamped with the peer review seal of approval.
A scientist with results to report wrote a paper and submitted it to a journal, which in turn sent the paper out to a committee of anonymous experts or “referees.” The referees could reject the paper, accept it or suggest changes.
While peer review could never guarantee the results were right, it assured that the work was important and the methodology sound.
There may be as many as 16,000 peer-reviewed journals published, with subscription costs that can top $15,000 a year. Some are highly selective about what they print. The journal Science, a $35-million-a-year operation published by the nonprofit American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, which is meeting this week in Anaheim, prints on average 1,035 peer-reviewed papers a year on topics drawn from the biological and physical sciences--about 15% of the papers it receives.
The New England Journal of Medicine, published since 1812 by the Massachusetts Medical Society, prints about one in 10 papers submitted to it for review. The Journal of the American Medical Assn. is equally selective.
Not all journals are nearly that discriminating, however. In chemistry and physics, for example, scientists say the acceptance rate in second- or third-tier publications can easily reach 95%.
“Eventually, everything that is not outright nonsense is going to be published in one form or another,” said Robert D. Bovenschulte, director of the American Chemical Society’s $85-million-a-year publications division, which prints 27 journals of its own.
In some journals--both peer-reviewed publications and some without review--researchers pay by the page to have their results published. At many smaller journals, researchers may pay to submit their papers and pay again to have them reviewed. It’s worth the price because journal publication is key for scientists’ careers and is also how researchers communicate the results of their work.
But although most scientists understand the hierarchy of journals, the world’s popular media are less discriminating, particularly in recent years, as coverage of science and medicine has escalated. Even findings that appear in little-regarded journals have found their way onto the airwaves or into newspapers.
Increasingly, even the prestigious journals are driven by market forces rather than scientific ones. “As journals get more competitive with each other, they love having newsy science as opposed to worthy science,” said Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences. “They have gone overboard.”
In some scientific fields, information increasingly is reaching the public without the filter of a journal, sometimes prematurely.
Research physicists have been communicating with one another electronically since the earliest days of the Internet, sharing preliminary results before sending their data to journals for publication. About four years ago, Paul Ginsberg, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, began collecting these electronic “preprints” in an interactive electronic journal.
Today, thousands of physicists in 60 countries send and receive the latest research data through this computer archive every day. Many see it as a model for the future of scientific publishing, even though the work is not peer-reviewed.
“There is no such thing as journal publication in physics right now,” says physicist Roberto Peccei, Dean of Letters and Science at UCLA. “The moment people have something interesting, they send it to the Los Alamos server and it’s out there.”
In the eyes of many physicists, that is a good development. Critics have long charged that the peer-review system encourages inbreeding because a relatively small group of experts exercises an enormous amount of control over what gets published and when. These established experts sometimes reject the most groundbreaking papers by upstart newcomers. Bypassing peer review by electronic publishing is a more democratic system, supporters say, as well as one where mistakes can be corrected almost instantaneously, simply by sending a new announcement to the server.
But although faster communication--and on-line peer review, which some journals are trying out--is more convenient for researchers, it also means new findings can get wide distribution before anyone has an opportunity to double-check them.
A prime example of the resulting problems came last year when, for 24 hours, the world’s media warned people to brace themselves for the possibility of a cataclysmic collision with an asteroid called FX11. Like physicists, astronomers communicate by the Internet. Word of a possible collision course had spread from computer to computer faster than corrections could catch up with it.
Within hours, other researchers with more accurate calculations confirmed there was no need for concern--but not before the public, the media and world governments had been jolted by the unintentional alarm.
“It’s easier than ever before for mistaken information to make it into the consciousness of every last being on the planet before it’s corrected,” said NASA astronomer Stephen P. Maran, a spokesman for the American Astronomical Society.
By any measure, the ability of online medical information--and misinformation--to spread around the world is equally formidable.
Federal health officials say that 15.6 million adults used the Internet to search for medical data last year. By the end of this year, that number is expected to top 27 million people.
Many medical authorities, while quick to embrace the Internet in some ways, believe it has increased the amount of questionable--sometimes clearly wrong--information reaching doctors and patients. Cancer “cures” that have long been disproved, potentially dangerous diets and highly speculative medical theories can all easily be accessed on the World Wide Web.
“Direct electronic publishing of scientific studies threatens to undermine time-tested traditions that help to ensure the quality of the medical literature,” The New England Journal recently editorialized. Clearly, any trend that undercuts the monopoly that traditional journals have had on research is a financial threat to them. At the same time, however, the spread of unverified information can be a threat to the public.
Competition for Funds, Jobs
As new technology has eased the way for researchers to bypass traditional journals, increased competition for jobs and funds has created powerful incentives to do so.
Universities now produce about 25% more doctorates in science and engineering fields than the economy can absorb, according to analysts at Stanford University and the Rand Corp.
At the same time, it is harder for those researchers to get federal grants. At the National Institutes of Health, officials today say they approve one out of four worthwhile grant proposals they receive, compared to one in three a decade ago. The National Science Foundation, which reviews about 30,000 proposals every year, funds one in three.
As more scientists compete for research funds, “science has become not just an intellectual competition, but an economic competition for scarce resources,” says Caltech physicist and vice provost David Goodstein. And in that competition, honest and ethical behavior among scientists is showing “signs of distress,” endangering “one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice.”
In the physical sciences, favorable headlines can add up to money and jobs. Because of that, a form of “science by press release” has increasingly spread.
For example, when a Japanese laboratory announced last year that an elusive particle called the neutrino may have mass, they issued two press releases. The first announced the discovery; the second pleaded for more government funds.
At times, the pressure to generate headlines can lead to findings presented to the public that are inaccurate or badly out of context.
Some of the harshest criticism on that score has been aimed at NASA’s well-funded publicity machine. Last year, even the prestigious journal Nature blasted NASA for going public with images of a “new planet” based on the blurry image of a bright blob that appeared to be linked to a young star by a glowing filament. The astronomer who took the image had not yet written a paper on her findings--much less had them peer-reviewed.
NASA and many scientists counter that the public has a right to share in the adventure, wrong turns included. The recent Pathfinder mission to Mars had millions of Americans glued to their TV sets, as did the early Viking and Voyager missions. Should the preliminary results have been kept under wraps until findings were confirmed? Most scientists don’t think so.
Still, too many space science stories reported in the press “are premature, flaky, over-hyped or simply wrong,” says planetary scientist Clark Chapman at the nonprofit Southwest Research Institute.
In the biological sciences, the increased competition for government money has led to a much greater reliance on private funds--often with strings attached. Growing numbers of researchers have financial entanglements, and many face restrictions on what their employers allow them to talk about openly--rules that greatly hinder the free exchange of scientific information.
Sometimes the conflicts of interest are egregious, as when the Tobacco Institute paid scientists to write letters to scientific journals challenging a major 1993 government report on secondhand smoke and lung cancer. The scientists did not disclose they had been paid to write the letters.
Other conflicts require greater analysis to discern. An extensive study published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine discovered, for example, that virtually all the scientists who wrote journal articles supporting calcium channel blockers as a treatment for high blood pressure had a financial relationship with the manufacturers of the medications.
The study examined 70 articles published between March 1995 and September 1996--at the height of the controversy over the potential dangers of such drugs--and found that all the doctors who supported the heart medications had received free trips, speaker’s fees or money for educational programs and research from the companies. Fewer than half of those who criticized the drugs had received similar largess. Only two of the 70 articles disclosed any conflicts of interest.
Indeed, when Tufts University researchers recently looked at 1,000 scientists who wrote research papers in 14 major scientific and medical journals, for example, they found that fully one-third of them had a direct financial stake in the research.
“There is no question that the culture of the biological sciences has changed,” said Sheldon Krimsky, a biotechnology analyst at Tufts. “We now have other values we have to consider. We are no longer just interested in pursuing knowledge. We are also trying to market that knowledge.”
Many argue that such conflicts are irrelevant because the facts of an experiment should speak for themselves. But as studies of tobacco and pharmaceutical research have shown, an expert’s scientific position often can be predicted by his or her financial relationships.
Major journals have begun to update their rules about disclosure of conflicts of interest. But the changes have been slow and have so far been taken up by only a handful of publications.
A Pot of Gold for Bioscientists
A second broad area of problems involves efforts by research sponsors to limit the flow of information among scientists.
A study of several thousand researchers done by health policy analysts at Massachusetts General Hospital recently found that scientists at the top 50 research universities often delayed publication of their work for commercial reasons or refused to share results with their colleagues at all.
And when Harvard University researchers questioned 3,500 scientists at 50 major universities, they found that nearly half had been given free equipment, support for students, newly cloned genes and other biomaterials, or travel money by companies with interest in their research. Almost a third of the researchers said the donors wanted pre-publication review of any articles stemming from use of the gifts. A fifth said the companies wanted ownership of anything arising from the research that could be patented.
As industry plays a greater role in funding the life sciences, the profit motive is almost irresistible, says John Moore, president of Grove City College in Grove City, Pa., and president of Sigma Xi, a research society that includes 80,000 scientists and engineers.
“In the biological sciences, people see a tremendous pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and they are much more tempted to get into these arrangements than, say, an astronomer,” Moore said. “There is not much money to be made from discovering a new black hole.”
But while the life sciences are feeling the greatest impact from commercial entanglements, the erosion of public confidence could taint all science, some fear.
“What is dangerous is the unwitting erosion of public science by the expansion of proprietary science as researchers in academia scramble for funds,” said British physicist John Ziman, former chairman of the Council for Science and Society.
“I think we are risking the public trust,” said Joseph Bordogna, acting deputy director of the National Science Foundation.
In any event, experts agree that the public should take scientific discoveries with a grain of salt--the bigger the claim, the more salt. Even established research turns out to be wrong. Once, experts did not believe in continental drift, noted Maran at the astronomical society. Nor atoms, for that matter.
“It would not hurt the public to pick up on the feeling that when experts say something it isn’t necessarily true,” Maran said. “It’s just what the experts are saying. . . . People could learn from that.”
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The Gatekeepers
New research is most often filtered through any one of thousands of peer-reviewed journals that publish experimental results for scientists. Major breakthroughs can surface in any technical publication, such as Cell, the Lancet, the Physical Review Letters, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But only a handful are influential enough to routinely set the public agenda in the world outside their particular specialty. By general consensus, those weekly journals are:
Nature: Founded in 1869 in London, Nature, which prints about 930 papers every year, now is the flagship publication of a group of specialty journals that publish peer-reviewed research on topics such as genetics, neuroscience, structural biology and medicine. Circulation: 59,000
New England Journal of Medicine: Founded in 1812, the journal has been published since 1921 by the Massachusetts Medical Society. The journal prints about 250 peer-reviewed research papers every year on clinical medicine and health-policy matters. To have research published in the New England Journal, one medical authority said, “can make your career.” Circulation: 230,000
Science: Founded in 1880 by inventor Thomas Edison, Science is published by the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. it prints, on average, 1,035 peer-reviewed papers a year on topics drawn from the biological and physical sciences. Circulation: 143,000
The Journal of the American Medical Assn.: Published since 1883, the Chicago-based magazine calls itself the world’s best-read medical journal. Every year, JAMA publishes about 550 peer-reviewed papers on topics concerning disease prevention, clinical medicine and health policy. The journal is distributed to AMA members. Circulation: 772,000
