Exploring Conflicts in Scientific Research

a story where, you know, the inability to find that gene that is responsible for this.

A, yeah, all right, looking at genomes isn't all that easy,

but we've gotten really good at it.

Finding the gene is not the same thing as understanding in what way it's caused.

It's just a question of saying, hey, that sequence seems to predict these people have this disorder, right?

And we're getting really good at sequencing genomes.

So if we can't find the gene, that's because that's the wrong explanation.

This reminds me of the remarkable lack of progress that O.J. Simpson made

in finding his wife's killer over the course of his lifetime after he was exonerated, right?

He never found the killer.

And that's because he was looking in the wrong place, right?

Looking in the mirror would have been a good idea.

He was looking everywhere but the mirror.

And so I suspect that's what's going on.

I think your hypothesis is correct.

And I have tested your hypothesis, by following the money.

So chapter five of my doctoral thesis, The Political Economy of Autism, follows the money.

And it was,

like many things in this research, it was sort of innocent at the beginning.

I started to hear about this crisis in science.

And it started with the fact that most scientific studies could not be reproduced.

And there was concern about that in scientific journals, that a lot of the foundational studies,

not just in psychology and psychiatry and some of the fields that we thought might not have reproducible studies, those were failing.

But it's also cancer research and lots of the foundational studies in medicine were not reproducible.

And so I started studying that and there was discussion on that in the scientific literature and why might that be.

So, it led to a conversation about capture of medical journals,

and the way that medical journals,

we think they're just, you know, publishing the truth, peer review and all that.

Well, no, that actually doesn't check out.

Medical journals are captured by industry, the pharmaceutical industry and others, so medical journals are kind of problematic.

And then, well, it turns out medical schools themselves are captured.

The top two-thirds of medical school faculty have some sort of contracts or grants from the pharmaceutical industry,

and we see university endowments that are entangled with investments

in intellectual property, new startups for pharmaceutical products and the rest.

So, there's capture of medical schools, and then I discovered that CDC,

NIH, FDA all have these private side foundations,

where private corporations can make contributions to this side foundation to fund the research inside these agencies, NIH, FDA,

CDC. And I thought, no, wait a second, that's a clear financial conflict of interest.

The side foundations for CDC,

NIH, and FDA enable them to enable a pharmaceutical company to place staff inside the agencies.

So, if Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,

Pfizer, Moderna, or the rest contribute to these side foundations for these federal agencies,

they can put an employee inside these agencies who's now an official FDA, CDC, NIH employee,

but who has dual loyalties to the agency where he or she works, and to...

Their real employer the pharmaceutical company.

So so so this chapter turned into a hundred pages

and when you follow the money What you discover is that the entire knowledge production process in science in medicine is

Captured by industry usually the pharmaceutical industry, but other toxic industries as well pesticides and plastics and fire retardants and all the rest it's

What we thought was this sort of pure

Scientific discipline is nothing of the sort it is this captured

Data laundering operation to increase profits for large industries.

Yeah, this is

Simultaneously

Shocking and not at all surprising right because of course

Market forces are extremely powerful

Evolutionary forces are extremely powerful There

are tremendous profits to be made the obstacle to those profits is supposed to be that

Scientifically we discover that the thing that you want to do that makes a profit is actually

so destructive that we can't let you do it and the institutions that are supposed to make those adjudications are

unfortunately Staffed by people who are corruptible and

So the the question is really

You've got a massive niche

For a parasite if only that parasite can accomplish a couple of things, right?

It effectively has to get past the immune system the immune system being the scientific Apparatus

and the regulators that are supposed to prevent us from doing things that are destructive to people

But that's not an impossible job

In fact, especially if there's a huge profit to be made

by doing it, then the point is that profit is made of money.

It's fungible and it can be used to incentivize those structures

to look everywhere but the one place they should be looking, for example.

So it shouldn't be surprising to us that they do that.

It shouldn't be surprising to us that medical schools effectively become training grounds for avoiding the truth.

And you can imagine, I mean, I've seen this happen in science where the graduate student comes in,

they have no power, they are in terrible jeopardy of being thrown out on their ear,

and so what they do is they learn which noises result in

you continuing to advance through this program so that the investment you've already made isn't wasted.

And by the time they get done with the program,

they've actually, you know, taken on these things as if they're, you know, well-established scientific truths and they're nothing of the kind.

So, you know, science is a beautiful process, it's self-correcting, but it only works if

you actually do it according to the underlying philosophy that makes it work.

Most scientists aren't even aware of the philosophy of science that makes it work, right?

They think it's sort of built of beakers and lab coats and data matrices and models or something.

That's not the scientific method, right?

The scientific method is an actual commitment to falsifying beliefs with a well-constructed experiment,

and this other process is so much more powerful that it overwhelms it easily.