Science: Brought to you by Pepsi

If you've been watching the blogs this week, you may have noticed an uproar at ScienceBlogs over a new corporate blog, Food Frontiers paid for and featuring bloggers from PepsiCo's R&D department.

In some ways, this was a cool idea. There's a lot of food science that we don't hear about, and it would be fascinating to get a glimpse, even through a filter, of what kind of stuff is being done by the R&D department of a major multinational. After all, they have scientists and do research too. Better Off Ted was a great sitcom, but somehow I don't think weaponizing pumpkins is really typical of what goes on.

In other ways, it was a terrible idea. Or at least badly implemented. Part of the mission of the blog was to discuss advances in nutrition and health policy. There's an obvious conflict of interest here for a purveyor of junk food. This source of potential bias, and the concern that this might simply be a propaganda arm for Pepsi loomed over the project.

Whether the blog would be more the former or the later (or some [un]acceptable mix), we'll never know. Several ScienceBloggers took issue, and made a fuss threatening to leave the network (and in some cases following through). Others took a wait-and-see approach. After all, this all happened before any real content appeared on the offending blog. Sb admin scrambled to fix the mess, first changing the format so it was more obviously paid content but eventually scrapping the whole thing.

A round-up of ScienceBlogs posts about the Pepsi fiasco, including admin response can be found here (scroll down)

A list of bloggers leaving the network (and new digs) is being maintained here.

The role of industry at a collective like ScienceBlogs, and how to properly include them is a complicated and interesting issue. As made clear by the range of responses to the initial introduction of the Pepsiblog, not an easy one to get people to agree on.

Corporate Profits Take Priority over Breast Cancer Prevention?

A recent Nature article describes the cancellation of a planned NIH trial (STELLAR) that would have compared the effects of newcomer drug Letrozole to the older Raloxifene in preventing breast cancer in post-menopausal women. While many potentially valid reasons were offered for the cancellation, other issues raised give cause to question whether the North American approach to cancer drug development is fatally flawed:

"the panel was strongly influenced by the fact that letrozole, made by Novartis, goes off-patent in 2011."

Translation: Who cares if letrozole prevents breast cancer if a corporate monopoly won't have the chance to exploit for ridiculous profits?

Hopefully this statement was issued by a disgruntled colleague and the Novartis bottom line doesn't really determine NIH trial funding decisions. Did Novartis threaten to drop their $30M/free drug contribution to the US government's $55M investment? Why should Novartis' interests be the only priority here? Once the drug is off-patent, it would available for generic production and even more accessible to patients. Must we always look for financial "returns" to justify investment in medical research? Isn't improving human health enough of a payback? Maybe it's about time North American governments reclaim some capital from the private sector to support publicly-funded research that benefits human beings instead of accountants.

Chocolate-Funded Researchers Fudging the Data?

Unfortunately, corporations seem to have perfected the art of corrupting academic research to help up their street cred and push their products. It's fairly simple to do if you have a decent sized budget and can be accomplished in three easy steps:

1. Throw lots of soft money into funding research chairs, grants, conferences, lectures, consultancies, etc. for cash-strapped scientists at public institutions to investigate your product. Remember, "industry-funded research is 4 to 8 times more likely than independently funded research to result in findings favorable to the sponsor".
   
2. See what they produce and reward those who put out positive results with continued funding, while cutting support when you get results that don't help you sell products. It's survival of the fittest - but don't worry, the theory of evolution is public domain and can be freely exploited without necessitating royalty payments to the descendants of Charles Darwin.
3. After a few cycles of this "directed evolution of truth" the data should more or less be saying what you want. Polish things off by having your scientific pawns publish drastically over-hyped and over-stated interpretations of their data in a peer-reviewed journal, the higher the impact factor the better. Boisterously announce the publication of these findings with an even more over-hyped press release to major media outlets. Don't forget to to reward your peons with an all-expenses paid trip or at least a nice dinner party. Or maybe a chocolate bar.
   

I think the big pharmas were probably one of the first to use this method to beef up the street cred of their drugs, and more recently other industries like the winemakers have been getting into the action. Sure...a glass of red wine a day is the key to longevity because it contains flavonoids. Then again, if you're really after health, you could always skip out on the toxic alcohol content and just eat a grape or drink some juice.

Anyway, now it's chocolate-funded research, and things are just getting so ridiculous it's funny. This great article by blogger Mark Klempner describes how the Mars bar company is manipulating academia to demonstrate the supposed benefits of the "flavanols" in their products, while of course ignoring the massive negative effects of the sugars and fats they contain. I mean come on, we're talking about JUNK FOOD here. I would be embarrassed to be associated with a would-be serious academic institution such as the University of California at Davis, who support a Mars bar endowed chair in nutrition and have allowed their researchers to recieve at total of $10 million in research funding from the chocolate bar maker. Maybe they should be calling themselves something like "Department of Junk Food and Obesity Promotion, University of Mars Bar at Davis" instead. These guys even have a paper in PNAS that is commonly cited on chocolate industry propaganda websites. On these sites you can find quotes from people at the center of this conflict of interest, like Harold Schmitz, Mars Chief Scientific Officer and UC Davis visiting professor in nutrition: "Traditional cocoa processing often destroys the flavanols, but Mars technology helps to retain these naturally occurring nutrients from cocoa. This new research emphasizes the importance of understanding the potential public health applications of emerging cocoa science, which is a challenge we take very seriously at Mars." Priceless.

The saddest part is that it's usually not obvious, when you read a paper like this, see a poster or hear a talk, that the research has been funded for corporate gain. Instead you're just left wondering why you've wasted your time listening to a bunch of meaningless, over-stated, irrelevent and massaged data disguised to look like science.

Great piece though, and I think he's bang on. The Brave New World reference is interesting although disconcerting. (Naturally, Klempner manages to tie global waming into his article as well).