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posted by Fnord666 on Friday May 10 2019, @03:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the of-course-it-does dept.

Coca-Cola struck agreements to fund health studies at several public universities that gave the beverage maker the ability to review and kill studies it didn't like, according to a new report from the University of Cambridge.

Cambridge's Department of Politics and International Studies discovered Coke's demands while examining research funding agreements between private corporations and public institutions. It reviewed some 87,000 documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

Its report, released Tuesday, said Coke retained the right to "quash studies progressing unfavorably" or "pressure researchers using the threat of termination" in at least five agreements with various academic institutions between 2015 and 2016.

"It's a playbook from Big Tobacco and Big Pharma. We looked to see if this is something that can happen with Big Food," said Dr. Sarah Steele, a policy researcher from Cambridge and lead author of the study, which was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Public Health Policy.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/07/report-says-cokes-research-funding-gives-it-right-to-kill-studies.html


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  • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday May 11 2019, @04:52AM

    by jmorris (4844) on Saturday May 11 2019, @04:52AM (#842217)

    You will find many of your cherished myths are just that, myth. Raise your hand if you know that the earth centered side of the argument had some pretty potent arguments on its side. The big one, the big KABOOM shut up the other side for quite some time was not religious, it was scientific. Parallax. They knew what parallax was, they knew that if the Earth went around the Sun there should be some up there in the stars. But it wasn't there. So what do you silly heliocentric jagoffs have to say? Huh? Well they didn't have a good counter argument and wouldn't until we had much better telescopes. They managed to get the upper hand politically though and simply roll over the argument, pretty much how much of science works today.

    All funding of science has the same strings, either overt or implied. Try finding an answer the National Science Foundation doesn't like and see what happens to your career. Doesn't matter what field. Human biological diversity exists? You are done. Vaccines might not be 100% safe? Toast. Climate models might not be 100% reliable and / or might not predict certain DOOM if we don't give the U.N. control of the world? Better have a backup career in mind before hitting submit on that one. So how is that any different from accepting funding from big cola, big pharma, big agribusiness, big banking, etc.? Hint: it isn't. And none of it is science.

    Ever wondered why the rate of progress outside the purely monitizable fields (like new chips) has slowed? There is your answer. Lab coats, test tubes and a copy of Mathematica does not make one a scientist. Science is not a product of peer review either, that is a popularity contest. Only the rigorous application of the Scientific Method makes one a scientist. We had more scientists in the 19th century when most were the idle wealthy playing at it; because doing science was considered high status.

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