Academic Research, Scholarship-for-hire, Conflicted Science

Washington, D.C., is rampant with conflicts of interest, researchers and academics who have been "bought off," bureaucrats and politicians looking to move (and make more money) on K Street . . . .

The Republican Street Fight over Transparency in Government - The Daily Beast: "...No one better understands the dangers in conflicted science than the chief administrator of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, David Michaels. Michaels is an epidemiologist and a professor (on leave) from George Washington University. In 2008, he published a terrifyingly depressing account of the consequences of conflicted science, Doubt is Their Product. That title was drawn from the famous 1969 Brown & Williamson memo declaring “doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ [linking smoking with cancer] that exists in the mind of the general public.” The strategy of the tobacco industry was to use “science” to attack science, so as to generate skepticism about whether smoking cigarettes caused cancer..." (read more at link above)

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