Partnerships between industry and science can be tremendously valuable, but unfortunately they sometimes play a pivotal role in disinformation campaigns that undermine the public good. The most notorious example of this comes from tobacco. Despite tobacco killing an estimated 100 million people in the 20th century, the tobacco industry fought evidence linking smoking to lung cancer by funding biomedical research—even when it knew the truth. As internal memos show, academic allies were a critical and intentional part of the industry’s fight against health regulation. What industry gets from these partnerships is the appearance of impartial evidence that can be used to combat unfavorable policy. By delaying tobacco regulation for decades, industry reaped massive profits.
Tobacco is still at it, although the target is ever changing. Unable to deny the link to lung cancer, the industry shifted to second-hand smoke and now heated tobacco products (“smokeless cigarettes”). Recently in Japan a whistleblower at Philip Morris was sacked for alerting the public to a scheme the company used to infiltrate policy and epidemiological research on heated tobacco at two Japanese universities. While this case was exposed, the overall plan still worked: the 2020 smoking ban in Japan makes exceptions for smokeless cigarettes (Philip Morris’ most profitable product) despite lack of independent evidence that they are safe.
The tobacco strategy often includes bad actors and shady practices, such as ghost writing articles and prohibiting publication of unfavorable papers. Yet to effectively combat disinformation it’s important to understand that the influence can be more subtle. Study after study shows that funding can consciously or subconsciously tilt research in line with the sponsor’s goals. Sponsorship bias can happen at any stage, from selection of research topic to study design to interpretation of outcomes. Even if purely unbiased research were possible, still research could serve industry goals by distracting attention away from unfavorable outcomes; for example, the Council for Tobacco Research funded research into non-tobacco causes of harms such as “carpet fumes, radon, occupational exposures, genetic dispositions.”(Galison and Proctor 2020, 29) This “distraction science” muddies the evidential landscape necessary for developing good policy.
Perhaps the industry that has done the most harm is the $4 trillion fossil fuel industry. They have pushed climate change denialism and now climate obstructionism for decades. Pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into climate science research, academia has been “invisibly colonized” by this funding. Research supports misleading claims about carbon footprints, renewables, and climate policies, in addition to remedies that don’t require emissions reductions. An internal memo from the American Petroleum Institute in 1998 explicitly describes their strategy of providing grants for research that will undermine climate action, as do recently revealed documents in the US Congress’ 2024 hearings into dark money and fossil fuels.
Hundreds of industry-academia ties also follow this playbook, from Big Data to Big Agriculture to Big Food. A quick tour gives a sense of the scale:
Because the big companies are transnational and science is international, this is truly a global phenomenon. For instance the group International Life Sciences Institute may have its headquarters in the US, but it is funded by hundreds of transnational companies (e.g., Coca Cola, Dupont), has branches in 19 countries, and draws on industry-funded science from all over to advance its aims. Currently it is pushing food industry-favorable policy in Brazil, China, and India, whom together have approximately 3 billion people. Typically these disinformation campaigns help put the world’s poor in increasing peril, as they disproportionately suffer from climate impacts, pesticide exposure, and poor nutrition.
Science needs to stop aiding these harmful campaigns. The industry playbook weaponizes universities, science societies, and related entities against their own missions. Their mission is the creation of knowledge useful to the world. The tobacco playbook, by contrast, uses science to manufacture the production of ignorance detrimental to the public good. This practice is contrary to the “right to science”, which includes safeguarding access to good science. No wonder the World Economic Forum’s 2024 Global Risks Report list misinformation and disinformation as the top short-term risks to human development—ahead of extreme weather events, armed conflict and much else. The Union of Concerned Scientists has made combatting disinformation a point of emphasis for years. And the UN’s Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights stipulates that governments must make every effort possible to promote accurate scientific information.
What can be done to combat academic-industrial disinformation? Industry resources flow through universities and science centers via so many channels — contracts, grants, and gifts, donations to university foundations, academic societies and conferences, revolving door with employment — and it buys so many diverse outcomes — research, testimony, lobbying, access — that no one policy will close the academic disinformation pipeline. However, there are ways to add friction to the pipeline. One idea is to ban industry funding for some types of research. Many schools worldwide have bans on tobacco money and others are disassociating from fossil fuel funding for climate research. Another idea is a funding pool, where industry provides money to a pool that universities then control.
Here I want to advocate for the most obvious first step: funding transparency. In all the cases mentioned above, some academic-industry funding ties were hidden. That is a central part of the tobacco playbook, for hiding the hand of industry allows the research to masquerade as impartial. Appearing independent is important if one is to use it to influence policy decisions, which is industry’s ultimate aim. Shining light on dark money is therefore a necessary precondition of tackling the problem. Industry funding does not mean corruption is present, but knowing it exists provides the bread crumbs that allow a questionable trail to be discovered. As climate economists have recently written, “basic financial transparency…should be a “no brainer” for universities.”
Despite advances in transparency in biomedical research, especially by good journals, conferences, and funders, still lots of funding is hidden. Not all fields have adopted these transparency norms, and not all scientists abide by them. Individual researchers should do better. Government, not-for-profit, and industry researchers should adopt the norm of disclosing their recent funding sources in all their research products wherever they can reasonably be understood to be speaking as an expert, e.g., articles, presentations, opinion pieces, white papers, press releases, courtroom testimony. However, policing this practice is hard, and what I want to draw attention to is the role of universities and societies in this problem.
It’s time that universities and affiliated science associations take responsibility for their role in the production of disinformation. Although universities meticulously track funding, so far as I know none publicly disclose all contracts, grants, and gifts. Gifts to research institutes are especially shrouded in darkness, even if they clearly are effective in producing industry-favorable science. Combined with weak conflict-of-interest policies — the “ethical floor” — universities and related research entities enable this practice. They push their ethical burden onto individual scientists, journals, and outside funding sources, even though it is their academic infrastructure and prestige that is being used by industry.
What universities — and where relevant, other scientific organizations — can and should do is easy. They already maintain registries of who funds what and when. Make this information public. In particular, when legal, all externally-sponsored research project grants and gifts should be disclosed yearly in a publicly accessible database, with the funder, funding amount, project title, principal investigators or institutes all disclosed. With one simple action they would shine light on dark money, thereby striking a serious blow to the disinformation pipeline. Here is a sample policy and a recent call by UK academics for transparency to Parliament.
Shiro Konuma, the whistleblower in the above Philip Morris case, wanted “sunlight to pierce through the clouds of Philip Morris.” Transparency is not the solution, but it is an easy first step to protect the mission of our knowledge institutions, which are so important to the development of good public policy.
Member of the ISC Inaugural Committee for Freedom and Responsibility in Science (2019-2022)
Tata Chancellor’s Professor of Philosophy
Co-Director, Institute for Practical Ethics
University of California, San Diego
President-Elect, Philosophy of Science Association
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The information, opinions and recommendations presented in our guest blogs are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect the values and beliefs of the International Science Council
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