Interesting piece by John Tierney in the NYTimes on the practice of discrediting science by pointing out potential conflicts of interest. I pulled the following excerpt because it illustrates the Tierney's main argument, but the majority of the piece is in the context of climate science and the IPCC:
Why are journalists and ethics boards so quick to assume that money, particularly corporate money, is the first factor to look at when evaluating someone’s work?
One reason is laziness. It is simpler to note a corporate connection than to analyze all the other factors that can bias researchers’ work: their background and ideology, their yearnings for publicity and prestige and power, the politics of their profession, the agendas of the public agencies and foundations and grant committees that finance so much scientific work.
Another reason is a snobbery akin to the old British aristocracy’s disdain for people “in trade.” Many scientists, journal editors and journalists see themselves as a sort of priestly class untainted by commerce, even when they work at institutions that regularly collect money from corporations in the form of research grants and advertising.
We trust our judgments to be uncorrupted by lucre — and we would be appalled if, say, a national commission to study the publishing industry were composed only of people who had never made any money in the business. (How dare those amateurs tell us how to run our profession!) But we insist that others avoid even “the appearance of impropriety.”
via www.nytimes.com
