Abstract
In August 2018, New Solutions featured a paper by David Egilman, Clinical Professor of Family Medicine at Brown University, which reviewed efforts by the Union Carbide Corporation in the early 2000s to promote research suggesting that the asbestos-containing Bakelite posed little harm to human health. The paper offered a window into the tactics that corporate entities like Union Carbide use to discredit scientific evidence regarding the health risks of their products, and it came with an interesting back story. The piece had first been peer reviewed and published in January 2016 in the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health (IJOEH) where Egilman served as editor. But one year later, the journal’s publisher Taylor & Francis abruptly retracted the piece and removed Egilman from his position. The members of the journal’s editorial board, who had not been consulted about these moves, submitted a letter to the publisher expressing their “grave concerns” about the journal’s newly appointed editor, Andrew Maier, citing his close ties to industry and his leadership role in a corporate research consulting firm. 1 They noted that prior to Maier’s appointment IJOEH had “stood in a class by itself in publishing critical analyses and challenges of improper corporate influence on the standards of practice and scientific literature in our field.” In November 2017, the editorial board resigned en masse in protest of the journal’s new direction. 2 Eight months later, Taylor & Francis announced it would discontinue publication of IJOEH at the end of the calendar year. 3 (New Solutions agreed to republish Egilman’s piece after submitting it to its own peer-review process.)
The trajectory of Egilman’s paper—and the larger turmoil that has roiled IJOEH over the last year—is emblematic of the issues and controversies detailed in Martin J. Walker’s recent book Corporate Ties That Bind, released by Skyhorse Publishing. Subtitled An Examination of Corporate Manipulation and Vested Interest in Public Health, the book is a collection of articles and essays that delve deeply into “how corporations can, and have, distorted knowledge and actions on health impacts of products in which they have financial interests” (p. ix). Taken as a whole, the book well demonstrates the active role that corporate and industry interests often play in shaping scientific research and public policies on matters of environmental and occupational health.
In the book’s opening chapter, Walker notes that “many academics have been writing in the wings about conflicting interests . . . but have been unable to present their work as part of an academic whole, or a movement” (p. 36). The book itself provides a platform for members of this “underground academia” to share their writings in a forum unbound from the usual strictures of academic publishing. Walker has brought together a wide range of voices and perspectives for this collection. Contributors include academic researchers, medical and public health practitioners, journalists, and health activists from various countries, many of whom have gone up against corporate interests in their own professional work and/or have found themselves the target of industry attacks.
Some of the most effective contributions to Corporate Ties are arguably those that depict what Walker characterizes as “the whole bag of tricks used by corporations to censor views and research results critical of corporate science, toxic production, and their effects upon health” (p. 3). Egilman and his colleagues, for example, offer a chapter that details the litany of tactics corporations may use—sponsorship of industry-friendly studies, attacks on independent researchers, creation of lobbying groups and other front organizations, and so forth—to convince courts, government regulators, and the general public that their products pose minimal dangers, even (or perhaps especially) when more objective analyses may suggest otherwise. This promotion and exploitation of “bad science,” the authors make explicit, is used by corporations “to reduce expenditures on preventive measures or to avoid paying compensation to parties injured as a result of product manufacturing or use, thereby increasing their earnings and decreasing their liability” (p. 41). Thoughtful contributions by Neil Pearce and Bo Walhjalt examine the sometimes dense networks of social ties between industry, academia, and scientists and consider how those relations may influence the results of “independent” research in corporations’ favor, often in ways that avoid deliberate obstruction or corruption.
As one might expect from such a collection, Corporate Ties includes a number of valuable case studies that focus on specific actors and processes underlying the production of corporate-influenced knowledge, its interpretation and contestation, and its mobilization in the public sphere. Many of these studies rely on previously secret corporate and industry documents made public as a result of litigation or dogged investigative efforts by researchers and journalists. Highlights include chapters on asbestos, dioxins, silica, nuclear radiation, and mobile phone technology.
Several chapters approach the subject through the lens of individuals working within and around the corporate-academic-government nexus. Gayle Greene offers a fascinating look into the fierce rivalry between physician Alice Stewart and epidemiologist Richard Doll. Stewart sought (largely unsuccessfully) to alert the public about the dangers of low-dose nuclear radiation; Doll built an esteemed career attacking Stewart’s work and defending the safety of the nuclear industry. Only after Doll’s death was it revealed that he held paid consultancies with the Chemical Manufacturers Association, Imperial Chemical Industries, and Monsanto. In a similar vein, Devra Davis’s lively chapter on Wilhelm Hueper and Robert Kehoe explores the role of science and scientists in the crafting of public policy. The two men each got their start working as scientists for DuPont, and even as their professional paths later diverged, the shadow of their early corporate ties loomed large over their careers. Rather than attacking corporate interests directly, Davis uses the biographies to highlight an important truism about the promise and pitfalls of science as it relates to policy: While Hueper and Kehoe shared a naïve confidence that careful, methodical assembly of the right facts would lead directly to a better world, they held fundamentally different views of what that world might consist of and who would be in charge of making it right . . . Neither of them quite appreciated that what passes for facts depends on to whom those facts are presented and other circumstances that can create receptivity or hostility to their existence. (p. 362)
Given the ambitious nature of this project and the wide range of voices included in the collection, it’s perhaps inevitable that Corporate Ties occasionally strays from its stated focus. Topics such as homeopathy or electrosensitivity, for example, are introduced without drawing explicit connections to corporate entities or industry actors. Other chapters suffer when claims about collusion between corporations, researchers, and policymakers are not backed up with solid evidence. Walker himself remarks in the introduction that one of his goals is to consider corporate manipulation of science as one manifestation of the steady drift from representative democracy to a “corporatist future,” an intriguing theme that, with few exceptions, is not picked up in subsequent chapters.
These lapses notwithstanding Corporate Ties provides a much-needed space for its contributors to analyze and expose corporate influences, manipulations, and distortions in the realms of science and policy—and in the public sphere more generally. Given the recent fate of IJOEH, such spaces are more urgently needed than ever. Meanwhile, a number of new online platforms have emerged in recent years that offer unprecedented access to previously secret corporate materials and rich new opportunities for research, including ToxicDocs at Columbia University and the City University of New York,4–5 the Poison Papers Project sponsored by the Bioscience Resource Project and The Center for Media and Democracy, 6 the Monsanto Papers released by Baum Hedlund, 7 and the Industry Documents Library at UC San Francisco. 8 One only hopes that more collections like Corporate Ties—and indeed, journals such as New Solutions—will continue to serve as outlets for bringing these materials to light.