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REAL science depends on the dispassionate search for truth, said sociologist a half-century ago. To claim the mantle of scientist, a researcher must be divorced from preconceived bias or monetary gain, and the work should be subjected to the rigorous scrutiny of a community of peers. At the height of the cold war, Merton鈥檚 coda provided a ringing defence of Enlightenment values.

But by the time Merton articulated those ideals, the tobacco industry had already set in motion a pseudoscientific strategy that threatened to undermine them. Big Tobacco鈥檚 advance guard created a non-profit institute, hired scientists and commissioned papers with a single purpose in mind: to cast doubt on what would soon become a flood of evidence proving that smoking kills.

It worked. Public campaigns to combat smoking were delayed for decades; regulation was forestalled. In a 1966 memo, a tobacco industry official let the cat out of the bag: 鈥淒oubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the 鈥榖ody of fact鈥� that exists in the minds of the general public,鈥� he wrote. 鈥淚t is also the means of establishing a controversy.鈥�

Today, the doubt-and-delay strategy is used by almost every industry facing health and environmental challenges 鈥� including oil companies working to generate public scepticism about the role of carbon-based fuels in global climate change. As persuasively argues in , the tobacco industry鈥檚 anti-anti-smoking campaign has become the template that every company can turn to when its bottom line is threatened by health, safety and environmental laws.

He should know. Michaels, an occupational safety expert at The George Washington University in Washington DC and a former US government regulator, was caught up in the action as several of these kinds of campaigns played out. Benzene, asbestos, vinyl chloride, chromium 6, ortho-toluidine鈥� the pattern was always the same.

Companies, often operating through non-profit research institutes set up by themselves or by a trade association, hired scientists skilled in the arts of toxicology, epidemiology and risk assessment to poke holes in any research suggesting that exposure to these chemicals could cause disease or death. Even US government agencies and their contractors got in on the act, as the defence and energy departments鈥� campaigns to downplay the risks of perchlorate, nuclear-weapons-plant radiation and beryllium attest.

Doubt is Their Product exposes the names of industry-funded players and the tricks of their trade. Some reanalyse data to downplay the health or environmental risks of their clients鈥� products. Others testify as expert defence witnesses when those products are on trial.

But not all industry-funded studies or hired researchers can easily be dismissed. To his credit, Michaels admits that his field, epidemiology, is 鈥渁 sitting duck for uncertainty campaigns鈥�. Exposures must be estimated; human vulnerability must be extrapolated from animal studies; minute exposures to toxic chemicals may cause diseases such as lung cancer, but these diseases could also be triggered by half a dozen confounding exposures. Practitioners of the uncertainty craft often don鈥檛 have to try very hard to cast doubt on the assumptions behind the estimates of their more public health-oriented colleagues.

and cover much of the same ground in , but where Michaels uses detailed anecdotes, the University of Texas law professors rely on examples drawn from the popular press and legal scholarship.

They begin with a sober observation: studies informing regulatory decisions are hardly the cutting edge of science. How many scientists want to spend their careers chasing government grants to determine the fate of airborne toxins spewed from coal-fired electricity plants? The job becomes even less appealing when laws like the , created by a tobacco industry consultant and passed without debate, can be used to cast doubt on their work and undermine their conclusions.

Where Michaels organises his book around particular incidents, McGarity and Wagner take a thematic approach: how corporations hide data; how they use the courts to undermine independent scientists; how they successfully publicise their own studies. They even take a few well-deserved shots at public-health advocates who employ the same tactics, such as the environmental group who, in 1989, overhyped the carcinogenic risk of , a common pesticide.

Unfortunately, Bending Science too often relies on legalese to make a point, and I found myself scurrying to the footnotes to find basic information. Even then, my questions often went unanswered.

What can be done about this industry of manufactured doubt? McGarity and Wagner believe that greater disclosure of who funds science, public access to all data in industry-funded studies (as is now the case for government-funded studies), and the elimination of scientists with conflicts of interest from advisory committees will allow regulators to 鈥渨eed out bent science鈥�. That鈥檚 true, but only if agencies have the time and resources to do so.

鈥淲hat can be done about this industry of manufactured doubt?鈥�

Michaels calls for an accountability law to do for science what the Sarbanes-Oxley Act tries to achieve for business in the US, complete with penalties for scientists or corporate executives who manipulate data or restrict freedom to publish. His idea is based on a similar premise: sunshine is the best disinfectant.

I鈥檓 not so sure. After years advocating for such solutions (full disclosure: the for Science in the Public Interest where I work exposes failures by scientists to disclose conflicts of interest in the press and scientific literature, and lobbies against allowing scientists with such conflicts to serve on federal advisory committees), I believe the time has come to try an approach that Michaels mentions only in passing: true independence.

In 1971, Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson proposed that all scientific studies needed for regulatory purposes be conducted by investigators completely free of ties to companies with a stake in the outcome of that research. His proposal went nowhere at the time, but we鈥檙e beginning to see renewed interest in the idea 鈥� particularly in healthcare, where independent studies comparing rival medical technologies is one way to rein in skyrocketing costs.

This approach would require a much greater role for government-funded science, which anyone familiar with the internal politics of a National Institutes of Health grant review knows can have its biases. But institutional conflicts of interest are of less consequence and easier to manage than science driven by the corporate bottom line, which, as these two books copiously illustrate, inevitably undermines the Mertonian ideal.

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