Scientists’ Duplicity And Conflicts Of Interest Distort Regulation And Harm Farmers
February 8, 2017
Editor’s Note: For more on this story, see here.
From: Forbes
Scientists prostituting themselves by delivering “bespoke” scientific findings for their corporate sponsors and corrupting the scientific literature is a favorite trope of environmental and anti-industry activists. They rail against undisclosed conflicts of interest that, were they known, should exclude the individuals–and their technical expertise–from regulatory studies and deliberations, thus leaving the activists’ specious views largely unopposed.
But what if activist environmental scientists had their own conflicts of interest–undisclosed to governmental bodies or the public–so that their participation in regulatory bodies enabled them to push the positions and prescriptions of the organizations to which they were beholden? Wouldn’t that make the activists bleating about “transparency” and their pogroms against industry-connected scientists the height of hypocrisy? Wouldn’t that be an obvious and pernicious double standard?
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