A Science Historian Tackles Ghostwriting In Scientific Papers

A science historian looks to the past to understand our current moment, and how ghostwriting in scientific papers is harming public trust.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ira Flatow?

  Science Friday is supported by MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 0:19Flora Lichtman?

  I'm Flora Lixman, and you're listening to Science Friday. We keep hearing that these are unprecedented times for science. We have science skeptics running federal agencies, growing distrust of vaccines, and messaging from the highest levels of government that scientists are in the pocket of industry. But is it really a unique time for science? And what can we learn from history? We have just the person to answer those questions, a science historian who has gone deep studying skepticism in science. Naomi Oreskes is a professor of the history of science at Harvard University. Welcome back, Naomi.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you.

• 0:57Flora Lichtman?

  OK, I've heard that science comes under attack when it threatens authority. Is that a true statement? Is that true generally?

• 1:05Speaker 02

  Well, I hope it's true, because I'm sure I've said that myself.

• 1:08Flora Lichtman?

  Perhaps I heard it from you, Naomi.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  I've definitely written that in a book. So there's no question that one of the reasons science can be vulnerable is that sometimes scientists discover things that threaten powerful people, powerful interests, or threaten cherished beliefs, widely-held values. And so two examples that I've written about are evolutionary theory and acid rain. So quite different examples, and I think they're useful in that way. So we all know that, pretty much for as long as there's been a scientific debate about evolution, there has been resistance to the scientific findings that human beings have probably evolved just the same as frogs and snakes and aspen trees and all the rest. And that's an idea that has always threatened

• 1:54Speaker 02

  people, partly because it's been interpreted by some people as challenging, the idea that God made man in his image, and partly because a lot of people just don't like the idea that, in some deep way, we're not very different than the slugs that you find in your garden.

• 2:10Flora Lichtman?

  I don't know why.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, and people just don't like that. Uh, so that's one example. Uh, acid rain is almost the other extreme. And I love the example of acid rain because the scientists who worked on acid rain, who discovered that air pollution can make snow and ice and clouds acidic. And that does damage to trees, to fish, to property. And because that had to do with air pollution, it threatened the interests of people who produced air pollution, particularly the power industry, the electric power industry. And so they saw their work come under attack by people who didn't want to accept the truth of what it told us about air pollution and its relationship to power generation in this country.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  And of course, climate change follows on the heels of the acid rain story and is even bigger and more difficult because, um, it's not just about one particular kind of air pollution. It's about a kind of pollution that affects the entire globe.

• 3:07Flora Lichtman?

  Hmm. You know, I've also heard people say the problem right now is that science has become politicized. But was science really ever apolitical?

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Well, exactly. I mean, on some level, the idea that science could exist separate from the rest of society and therefore be completely apolitical, that's not an idea that any historian of science would defend. But that said, there's a particular kind of attack on science that's been going on for a while now. In my own work, I trace it to the Reagan administration of attacking sciences whose findings threaten powerful political and economic interests, like the fossil fuel industry or the tobacco industry. And in that sense, we have seen the deliberate attempt to politicize people who are hostile to scientific findings.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  But it's a different thing to see people deliberately trying to politicize scientific findings and deliberately trying to mobilize distrust of science for political ends.

• 4:10Flora Lichtman?

  I want to talk about this because I actually feel confused at the moment about this conversation about trust in science because. I feel like when we're talking about it today, there's some sort of nebulous us and them. Those of us who believe in science and those who do not. But, you know, it feels very muddy. We have scientists telling us that they don't currently trust our scientific institutions. We have, you know, pediatric groups suing the CDC. So how do you think about this?

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that's a great question. And I love the way you started it with the question about us and them. Because of course, that's not, no one who's trained as scientist, no one who does science would ever want to say there's us and there's them. Because we, and I'll put myself in this category because I'm trained originally as a scientist myself. We believe that science is a powerful toolkit for understanding the natural world and that the things we learn through science can make our life, our lives better, safer, healthier, possibly even happier. And so it's very sad when we see people rejecting scientific evidence for what appears to be not very good reasons. And I should also add, you know, public opinion polls on this point are actually rather heartening.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  So we have lots of rather good polling data, particularly from the Pew Research Foundation, that show that the vast majority of Americans do, in fact, still trust science and scientists. So something like 70% of Americans broadly trust science and scientific institutions. And

• 5:44Flora Lichtman?

  Which is quite high.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  Very high, much higher than, that's a very, very high number. There's not many other things.

• 5:50Flora Lichtman?

  Compared to journalism, it's really high.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Correct, compared to banks, journalism, Congress. I mean, scientists have actually done rather well compared to other institutions. So in that sense, there's a good news story here. It's not all doom and gloom. But that said, we're in this very challenging moment because of the corruption of certain scientific institutions. The current federal government, the current occupant of the White House, has deliberately corrupted the scientific processes at the Center for Disease Control. And you now have political ideologues in places that used to be occupied by independent scientists. And these political ideologues have now issued vaccine guidance that flies in the face of an enormous amount of both scientific research.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  And so now you have the situation where you have the American Academy of Pediatrics saying, well, actually, the old Vaccine guidelines made sense and we're sticking by them. And so that could be a very confusing situation for the public. And so what I always say about this is you have to ask yourself, who are the real scientists here? And it used to be you could simply say, well, scientists working in scientific jobs in federal scientific agencies, that was a pretty safe bet. What the current administration has done is to muddy those waters. And so now what we have to say is, well, who are the independent scientists? Who are the scientists who, as far as we can tell, have not been corrupted by deliberate political interference?

• 7:20Speaker 02

  And for that, we have to sadly now say that it's not the Centers for Disease Control, but it is the groups of independent scientists and physicians in this country like the American Academy of Pediatrics.

• 7:34Flora Lichtman?

  But what is in it for the federal government to undermine vaccines? What's the motivation?

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Well, that's a very good question. Of course, you'd have to ask them and they would probably tell you that they are standing up for the truth. I think that the best way to understand what's gone on in terms of vaccine safety is to step back and look at the larger history of anti-science activities from business-oriented conservatives in this country since the Reagan administration. So what a lot of my work has been about is about scientific research on environmental and public health topics like acid rain, like climate change, like tobacco, in which scientific evidence showed that commercial products like cigarettes or gasoline, products

• 8:22Speaker 02

  that were perfectly legal and that nearly all of us used, because if we go back to the 50s, you know, something like 75% of American men smoked, that these products were doing huge damage to the environment, they were doing damage to individual people's health. These findings were very threatening to powerful interests like the tobacco industry, or later the fossil fuel industry, or now today the pesticide industry. And so these industries began to organize. And literally to organize, and we've documented in this in our work, to fight the scientific evidence and to undermine public trust in science. But over time, over the course of decades, it became generalized to a kind of general

• 9:07Speaker 02

  anti-scientific position. Because these corporations realized that if they could undermine public trust in science in general, then in a way their job would be easier. They wouldn't have to convince us that cigarettes were safe. They could simply claim, oh, don't trust those egghead scientists. Don't trust those elitists at Harvard, like a Raskin. So it becomes a political strategy to protect corporate interests, to protect corporate profits, and also to protect a political position against government regulation of the marketplace. And so I think the vaccine story is best understood in that context, that if you extrapolate this broadly, which the people I've studied have done, they will say they don't want

• 9:51Speaker 02

  the government regulating the marketplace. They don't want the government telling us what to do. They think people should be free to do what they want. Now, that's a great idea in principle, but in this case, the people they're defending are actually corporations selling dangerous products. And so, once you take that position, then it becomes logical to say, well, we don't want vaccine mandates either. We don't want mask mandates. We don't want any kind of mandates. We just want freedom.

• 10:20Flora Lichtman?

  Well, there's some irony here, because if you listen to a congressional hearing with Health Secretary RFK Jr., he often talks about corruption in science. It's just a different corruption, or something.

• 10:34Speaker 03

  When I was a kid, NIH was the premier gold standard scientific institution in the world. Over the years, it was captured by industry and by, I think, a kind of ossification that happened at NIH. Because the longevity of some of the leadership there. And there was a tremendous amount of corruption.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Right. Well, there's two things that I think are important to understand. There's a tremendous amount of projection that goes on in this space. So the tobacco industry will accuse academic scientists of having a political or economic agenda, when in fact, they're the ones with the agenda. But to me, the tragedy about RFK, well, there's multiple tragedies there. But the tragedy that there really is corruption in science, and you know, that's another question we can get on to. But he's pointing the finger in completely the wrong place, in my opinion.

• 11:27Flora Lichtman?

  This is what I want to talk about when we come back. We have to take a short break, but when we come back, I want to ask you about your explosive paper on glyphosate, this active ingredient in the weed killer roundup. Stay with us.

• 11:44Speaker 04

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• 12:29Speaker 04

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• 13:01Speaker 04

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• 13:29Flora Lichtman?

  So, yes, let's talk about this. Let's talk about this investigative work that you did on this scientific study claiming glyphosate, which is, you know, one of the main ingredients in the weed killer Roundup, is safe. That's what the study said, and you looked into it. Tell me sort of where this work started and how it unfolded.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  Well, the work started in part because my fantastic postdoc, Sasha Korov, had a little spare time on his hands. So the idea was this. This very major paper, as you just mentioned, had been published in the year 2000, so 25, 26 years ago, that claimed to be an objective, independent, and comprehensive review of all the scientific data relating to the safety of glyphosate. And this review concluded that glyphosate was safe, and that it, in particular, that it was highly unlikely to cause cancer in humans. Now, about 17 years later, in 2017, there was a lawsuit in which a whole bunch of documents

• 14:32Speaker 02

  became available that showed that this paper had been substantially, possibly entirely, ghostwritten by Monsanto employees. But those employees were not-

• 14:43Flora Lichtman?

  The company that made Roundup.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  Correct, the company that made Roundup. But those employees were not listed as the authors of the paper. The people listed as the authors were a group of academics. So this is fraud. I mean, this is what we call ghostwriting, but I think that's a little bit too nice a term for it. It's fraud. You're claiming that the authors of the paper are people who are not, in fact, the authors of the paper. So it's a form of lying. And so this had come out in 2017. But the question I had was, okay, so what impact did this paper have? And so that's the question that Sasha and I took on. And what Sasha did was to use his computational skills, he's a computational social scientist, to track the impact of this paper.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  And we did that in three domains. Academia, so other scientific papers citing this paper. Regulatory agencies, so agencies like the EPA, making decisions about the safety of glyphosate. And then public understanding, as reflected in Wikipedia articles. And what we showed was that this fraudulent paper had had massive impact. It was one of the most cited papers ever written on glyphosate safety. It was extensively cited in government documents and Wikipedia pages relied on it as well.

• 16:03Flora Lichtman?

  The ripples went far and wide.

• 16:06Speaker 02

  Correct. So that's the result we published. Once our paper was published, then we reached out to the journal that had originally published the paper, saying, we believe this paper should be retracted because it was fraudulent and it's had enormous, in our opinion, adverse impact. The editor agreed, and so a few months ago, in December, the paper was, in fact, retracted.

• 16:30Flora Lichtman?

  If we zoom out, how widespread is this practice? Do you have any sense?

• 16:35Speaker 02

  Well, it's very difficult to tell because, of course, the people who do it don't admit it, right? And it's right. I mean, this is like, anytime you're trying to quantify deception, it's a very challenging thing to do. And part of my research has been trying to figure out how you can quantify deceptions. But most of the evidence we have comes from cases where there were lawsuits. And so emails, documents became public because of lawsuits. If we look at those lawsuits, most of them are actually not about pesticides, although there are a growing number having to do with glyphosate. Most of them are about pharmaceuticals, drugs and medical devices. And in that space, some researchers think that as many as half of all papers on drugs

• 17:20Speaker 02

  and medical devices may be at least wholly, maybe wholly or in part ghostwritten or in some other way inappropriately influenced by the manufacturers of those products.

• 17:31Flora Lichtman?

  Well, this is what I think is so confusing for the American public. We're here, if that's true, half the papers.

• 17:39Flora Lichtman?

  In this space, in the pharmaceutical space are fraudulent, essentially. Then when you hear someone like RFK say in a congressional hearing that there's massive corruption, you know, that's, that seems to be true. That matches with that, that data. So how do we parse which, which science is good science and which science is not good science, especially if the deception, it's deception, if it's hidden?

• 18:06Speaker 02

  Right. It's extremely difficult. And so I think that if people feel confused, it's not their fault. But here's what I want to say about it. This is why public funding of science is so crucial. Because if we want to preserve and protect the integrity and the objectivity of science, the most important thing we can do, the single most important thing we can do is to protect public funding. Because this corruption in pharmaceuticals and medical devices, and again, I'm quoting other experts who think it could be as high as 50%. We don't really know that for a fact, but even if it's 20 or 30%, that's still a very, very serious problem. It means that we have to take these studies out of the hands of the private sector actors

• 18:47Speaker 02

  who have a vested interest in a particular outcome and put it back in the hands of independent scientists who are, and I'm going to say this, some people may be cynical, but I'm going to say scientists who are really genuinely interested in the truth. And that's the reason why the current administration cuts on academic science and also independent science in the agencies is so incredibly dreadful. Because unless we have independent public funding of scientific research, then it makes it very, very difficult for us to ensure the integrity and trustworthiness of the science that we depend on.

• 19:24Flora Lichtman?

  This is an answer to the question, why publicly fund science?

• 19:28Speaker 02

  That's what I think.

• 19:29Flora Lichtman?

  So that it's honest.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Correct. Because it's much, well, let's just say it's much more likely to be honest. It's much less likely to be corrupted by economic interests than research that is funded by corporations that have a vested interest in a particular outcome.

• 19:45Flora Lichtman?

  You know, as we've reported on the show, Congress, in a surprising and bipartisan way, has rejected Trump's cuts to science in budgets. Over the last few weeks, we will see what happens with those bills. But what do you make of that? And why do you think that happened?

• 20:01Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's heartening because I think it shows that, like the American people, most members of Congress understand that science produces a net good for the American people. And not only a net good, but a really giant net good. Various people over the years have tried to quantify the benefit of science. It's not always an easy thing to do. But there are certainly things that we can show: savings in public health costs, savings in damage from earthquakes, new products that have been developed based on fundamental scientific understanding. And when you make those kinds of calculations, what you find is that public investment in science and technology more than replaces itself by many, many orders of magnitude.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  And I think that anyone who knows even a little bit about the history of science in this country understands that. And understands that if scientists come up with a cure for a disease, it's not just Democrats or Republicans who benefit from that. It's all of us. And if something like glyphosate is causing health damage across the country, we are all suffering from that, red states and blue states, urban and rural. So I think the evidence is so overwhelming of the benefits of science to society that we see people on both sides of the aisle, Republicans, Democrats, independents, realizing that federal funding for public science is a net good and should be sustained

• 21:28Speaker 02

  to the greatest extent possible.

• 21:31Flora Lichtman?

  Naomi Oreskes is a historian of American science at Harvard University. Naomi, thanks for joining me today.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

• 21:39Flora Lichtman?

  I know that you all will have smart thoughts about this subject and strong feelings, I suspect. You can always call us, 8774-SY-FRY. We would love to hear from you. This episode was produced by Dee Peterschmidt. And if you want to keep the conversation going, on Saturday, we're going to drop a special bonus episode I recorded with The Middle, a public radio show hosted by the great Jeremy Hobson, where we get into this from a few other angles. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.