Lethal Greed: How Corporate Manipulation of Science and Regulation Makes People Sick
Scientists launch a new research center to study what they say is now a leading disease risk factor: corporations.
Liza Gross
By Liza Gross
February 19, 2025
Youth soccer teams practice at Wilmington Waterfront Park in the shadow of a refinery in Los Angeles. Credit: Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Youth soccer teams practice at Wilmington Waterfront Park in the shadow of a refinery in Los Angeles. Credit: Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
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There’s been a marked shift in the types of diseases causing the most harm around the world over the past few decades. Chronic diseases like cancer, heart disease and metabolic disorders have overtaken infectious diseases like tuberculosis and cholera. It’s not genetics, age or lack of exercise driving the rapid rise in chronic disease, scientists at a new research center say.
“This shift, which has dramatically changed in the last 20 years, is due to corporate-produced risk factors,” said Tracey Woodruff, an expert on the health impacts of environmental exposures and director of the new Center to End Corporate Harm at the University of California, San Francisco.
“One in four deaths globally is due to exposures to chemicals, plastics and fossil fuels,” Woodruff said at a celebration of the center’s launch last week in San Francisco, adding that ultra-processed foods, opioids and tobacco are other “corporate-driven risk factors contributing to disease.”
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The new center will foster collaborations among scientists who study industry tactics to hide the harms of their products, taking advantage of UC San Francisco’s Industry Documents Library. The library, started to provide permanent access to millions of internal tobacco industry materials released through litigation, now curates collections of documents across the opioid, drug, chemical, food and fossil fuel industries.
“We’ll be using science and the industry documents to hold industry accountable,” Woodruff said. The goal, she said, is to study what she calls the leading vector of disease: corporations.
Inside Climate News asked the American Petroleum Institute, the American Chemistry Council and the National Association of Tobacco Outlets for their perspectives on the new center, but none of the industry trade groups responded.
A Window into Product-Defense Tactics
The center will harness the intellectual firepower of scholars and pioneers in the study of industry bias and the “commercial determinants of health” to build on groundbreaking research uncovering industry tactics to manipulate science, delay regulations and hide evidence of harm to defend their profit margins.
“If you look at a whole body of research on a particular topic, you’ll see that the industry-sponsored studies differ in their results and conclusions [from] the non-industry ones,” said Lisa Bero, chief scientist at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. “And they differ in a way that makes an industry’s product look more favorable, either less harmful or, in the case of drugs, more effective.”
For years, Bero and her colleagues detected this “funding effect.” But when they presented the evidence to regulators or policymakers, companies would insist that the studies they financed used the same methods as independent studies.
Lisa Bero, chief scientist at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz, speaks about industry bias in research during the launch of the Center to End Corporate Harm at the University of California, San Francisco. Credit: Liza Gross/Inside Climate News
Lisa Bero, chief scientist at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz, speaks about industry bias in research during the launch of the Center to End Corporate Harm at the University of California, San Francisco. Credit: Liza Gross/Inside Climate News
Then in 1994, a whistleblower dropped off more than 4,000 pages of confidential internal tobacco industry documents from the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. in the office of UC San Francisco researcher Stanton Glantz. About a decade later, the researchers obtained another collection of previously secret documents, this time from an off-label marketing lawsuit against the drug industry.
“These documents basically told us what was really happening,” said Bero, a leading authority on corporate bias and conflicts of interest in research.
Researchers could now analyze memos, letters, emails and other materials written by company executives, scientists, lawyers and PR firms. They unearthed elaborate industry campaigns to fund research that supported their products, suppress research that didn’t, discredit researchers who questioned their products’ safety and even influence how science should be evaluated.
It was extremely difficult to convince policymakers and regulators of these tactics, Bero said, until researchers could show them what industry players were doing, in their own words.
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