How Science Is Manipulated By Industry (and What You Need to Know To Protect Yourself) with Dr. Yogi Hendlin

Ari: I’m going to ask you a question that you’re not going to like and you’re going to be resistant to it because you’re an academic and you’re a professor, and you’re a scientist. You’re not going to like it but I’m going to ask it anyway. I’m curious what your response will be. There are some people who are going to hear everything you just said and will still conclude, “Well, maybe there’s a few examples of these things here and there. Okay, thalidomide and Vioxx and opioids and ExxonMobil and some of the other examples you gave. By and large, science is this beautiful entity that’s bringing us the truth. These industries are working towards our benefit and pharmaceutical companies, we can trust their science.”

A little digression, since I was a little kid science has been my passion, health science, since I was 12, 13 years old. My conception of the entity of science as a young kid was always- and even up till quite frankly pretty solid even relatively pre-COVID, was always what I now realize is a very childlike, very naive worldview and view of science, which is that science is science. There’s all these brilliant altruistic scientists working to find the truth and find cures for disease and help the world.

Of course, on an individual level, there are lots and lots of good people involved. I absolutely, and I think most people do not realize the extent to which the entire process, the entire entity of science has been so extraordinarily corrupted by financial interests who are literally producing fraudulent science, manipulating the science, manipulating statistics to manipulate the results of the science that they’re doing or presented in misleading ways, who are the file drawer effect, all the negative studies that they conducted. Those never see the light of day. They just end up in a file drawer and never even submitted to journals for publishing.

The extent to which they are suppressing dissenter, suppressing people or scientists who are voicing opposition as you just said, and also paying off politicians to enact policies that are in their financial interest. The extent to which what’s the science that’s published in journals and media is so extraordinarily influenced by people who have a financial agenda who are literally producing propaganda to convince hundreds of millions of people to believe certain things and presenting it as science or presenting it as factual news in mainstream news.

Just to realize how much of this is propaganda has been a total shock to me, particularly in the last two years. Now, my question to you that you’re not going to like is if you were going to generalize from everything that you were just talking about, what conclusions should people draw as far as how much should they trust science? How much should they trust an article they see in a journal? How much should they trust a headline they see in the paper that says, “According to studies, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah”?

If you were going to say on a scale of 1 to 10, how skeptical should people be and cynical should people be of whether that is actually truthful information or not, or whether it is some kind of, essentially, propaganda meant to serve some financial agenda? How would you grade that, obviously, understanding the limitations of generalizing and that there are exceptions to the rule?

Yogi: Thanks for your question, Ari, and I’m going to raise you an ace.

Ari: [laughs]

Yogi: Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway write in their book, Merchants of Doubt, that it’s not just financial interests. It’s also ideological interests. It’s the cold warriors who feared any impingement upon individual liberty. A very, you could say, state of exception, war-driven, anti-communist notion that they basically saw any sort of environmentalism, taking care of the environment, taking care of our own surroundings, as a watermelon work. Green on the outside, red on the inside. That any social program or social welfare was actually communist, so you get these false equivalencies all the way down.

What’s super interesting for me is that their book and many others’, colleagues of mine,- Naomi Oreskes is one of my heroines that I really look up to, show that ideology plays a huge role. We know that now if you’re researching food and taught medical journals, you have to disclose your own diet. It’s not just enough the fact that there are studies saying mangoes are good for everything funded by the mango industry. Yes, there apparently is a mango industry.

It’s also the fact that if I am a fervent believer of, say, a keto diet, the findings from the studies that I will look at in my literature review, in my systematic review, in my meta-analysis, and in my own experiments will have unconscious bias, a confirmation bias of what I already believe towards delivering similar results. This question of belief and science really is, again, like realizing that we’ve been gas-lit all the way down by for-profit at the expense of collective health agendas. It goes even deeper. It’s the idea that science needs to have triangulation. I would say you can never read one study and draw a conclusion from it.

As far as I can say from my own point of view as a scientist, you know who is working for whom, what their agenda is, and how good they are. If they’re sloppy with certain work– My work on tanning beds with our lead author, Eleni Linos, a professor at Stanford who led this study. She has been working on tanning beds and cancer and sun exposure and cancer for decades. She has done it at the top universities in the world. She has put herself, put her neck out, and gotten personally attacked for some of the papers that she’s written and made. That’s usually a good sign if somebody is getting attacked by the industry. [laughs]

To be honest, I’ve had Philip Morris write hit pieces on me, for example. That’s usually a sign of cred in my book. Knowing who authored the papers, from my point of view, is really important. Or if somebody I really respect says, “This paper is legitimate,” I’m going to rank it higher in my first reading. Most of our understanding of the world is the first five minutes.

The world is made out of these chain links of trust. If I trust you, Ari, and you say, “Hey, check out this paper,” I’m going to be predisposed to read it in a positive light because you recommended it to me. That’s where our media needs to really play an important role here. This has been called in some cases the cordon sanitaire, the sanitary cord. Belgium, for example. Belgium’s interesting because they are more critical of any sort of fascism, you could say, than most other news media, because they have a policy for all their journalists, that they are simply unwilling to platform certain ideas and people. I think that this is, even though we might say, well, this is censorship, or this is closing things down. I think that there is an interesting balance here because we all do think that there are certain things that are obnoxious and abhorrent to us, and that will actually acidify and meltdown our society if too many people start believing in that narrative and start acting according to that.

It really is this sort of intergenerational project of science, which is totally flawed. From the beginning, if you look at science came from Alchemy. Alchemy was trying to find the philosopher’s stone. It was basically, people trying to get rich or live forever. I don’t want to place undue reverence for science. At the same time, I think there are ways for scientists to earn the public’s trust. I think it’s like a Janus-faced question where you’re looking one way at the public trusting scientists, but also scientists earning the public’s trust, and that has to be also a full-time job. It can’t be marketing. You have to have a product that’s good, and that product is integrity.

Integrity is not something that happens in a bubble, small digression, if I may. The philosopher, one of the most famous alive, Anthony Kwame Appiah, he talks about we are products of our situation. If you look at experimental psychology, good people can do bad things if they’re put against the wall. Bad people can do good things when they’re given an opportunity or a chance. He has this example that he talks about the earlier paper that was done on Princeton seminary students.

They were studying theology, these are good people, they want to help the world. They had a sermon. You have about 30 students. They had a sermon on the Good Samaritan the day before, and then they have a very important meeting with the dean. In one scenario, you have 15 students, they show up, they have to walk past the church, there’s a beggar at the church asking for alms. Something like 60%, 65% of those students who had plenty of time to get to the class, they gave something.

Now, that was the control group. The other half of the group, another 15, 20 students, they had a road close where they would normally park to get there. They were 10, 15 minutes delayed, and they’re rushing. See, the same good samaritan exact same example, they gave maybe 20% of the time. It’s not like it was bad versus good seminary students. They were simply in a rush and couldn’t do it. All of these factors in our lives that make us not able to do the things that we would like to do that we could do. I know when I’m sick, I’m less likely to put my compost in the compost. More likely just to throw it in the trash if it’s closer by. All these little things really have an impact on our society.

I don’t think that I can answer your question about generalizable rank, because I don’t think that that’s how science should be looked at, as this thing where we trust it a little bit, or we trust it a lot, or we give it full credence or no credence. I think that that’s part of maturity and intellectual maturity for each and every one of us to be not alone, not these lone wolf sovereign have to know everything, have to master everything, but to have a network of people that we trust, that we can trust, and that we can more or less be like, “Oh, okay, great. Ari said this. I’m going to take a look at it and I will take a look at this thing, and maybe it can make my life better.”

Ari: Excellent. That was a very sophisticated and articulate evasion of my question. [laughs] I’m not going to let you off the hook though. I liked everything you said. However, Let me phrase it this way. In the last two years, in particular, I think there has been a narrative that has been pushed on the population via lots and lots of propaganda. That if one has distrust, if one defaults to some level, either mild or moderate or strong level of distrust and skepticism, cynicism of industry-funded research, that makes one a science-denying conspiracy theorist.

What is maddening about this is to have a huge portion of entire populations, who have no scientific background, no scientific literacy, no research into any of the things that you’ve, for example, have specialized in like actually examining and researching the relationship of industry influence on scientific results. Who don’t know anything, even one layer deep of the 1,000 layers that you could explore on that, who default to the assumption of–

Who default to complete trust of industry-funded science and who are convinced that anybody who doesn’t default to complete trust of industry-funded science is some kind of crazy whack job conspiracy theorists. Like you and I, knowing this topic, you obviously know it way deeper than I do, but I know enough to be pretty skeptical and to look at who’s funding this study, and to look at the greater body of evidence and to make sure there’s no statistical manipulation and to consider the possibility that if it is industry-funded, there’s a good chance that it has been corrupted by that in some way.

To have people who have again, no scientific background, no expertise, no science, no even basic scientific literacy, then looking at my positions, like I’m some kind of crazy whack job for not trusting that science in the same way they do, is ridiculous and absurd to me. What I’m getting at, what I want to be blunt, I would love for you to tell those people why they should not default to complete trust of industry-funded research, or since it’s not always clear if the research is industry-funded, default to at least some mild level of skepticism of that research and not just assume that it’s true.

Yogi: Absolutely. I have written about this also the lack of pluralism. The idea that we can have many different, even opposing opinions but be on the same project, on the same team, wanting safe health for a population, wanting the environment to get better, and have different ideas of how to do that, or different ideas of what the real problem is. That’s another bit of it. These last few years have been incredibly divisive, and almost vertiginous. We’ve been so confused as to fights with people who we thought we knew and then they come believing something different or imposing their beliefs on us.

It has felt, I think, for many really difficult to have open and honest conversations and feeling one, that we can speak our minds, and two, that we can just respectfully disagree. I think part of that is that we’re in war times. We had 20 years of the war against terror and then we had the Corona pandemic, and now we are in another war, or hopefully, we aren’t in it yet. There’s the Russian-Ukrainian war that’s captured the world basically involved in it. It’s very sad when you have, first of all, a one-size-fits-all way of approaching things because we know that, for example, in many subsistence economies, that not being able to go to your job for a lockdown has caused starvation. There’s a really good article in this, unfortunately, now defunct. A newspaper called The Correspondent which was offshoot of a Dutch paper. This, I believe, a Nigerian author, she said, “Why social distancing won’t work for us.” It was talking about cultural differences there. I think that this is the first time in history that we’ve had an organized one-size-fits-all top-down policy. I think that for white-collar workers, it wasn’t much of a bother in a certain respect compared to people who are frontline workers or essential workers or need to work every day in person, manual labor, to eat.

There has been publication about these topics, but they haven’t filtered to the top of the news stream or the Twitter feed. I generally find that in academia, you do have more freedom to actually discuss, yes, inconvenient truths than in popular discourse. That’s a whole nother topic. Absolutely, science has become politicized because we have been in a state of exception, a wartime where democracy is, in many ways, and science is a democratic enterprise, has been shut off to a certain extent and people with disagreeing opinions, The Barrington Collective or what they called The Barrington Declaration, the great Barrington Declaration, they had some different approaches to how to deal with the virus which basically, one year later, is happening worldwide at this point.

At the time, they were derided and they were not able to be part of integrated scientific discourse. Instead, it became very fragmentary where you had a dominant discourse and a subterranean or a pariah discourse. You had different people glomming on to each one as if they weren’t also in conversation with each other as if there aren’t many degrees on a spectrum of ideas, beliefs, perspectives or as if science were a monolith, then this was pseudoscience over here or bad science. I think that that is very difficult because it also undermines public trust in science.

That’s, I would say, been a strategic error, the dealing with the Corona pandemic because we, most of the time, are wrong and we’re proved wrong in the future. When we think that we have a monopoly on truth, that’s a dangerous thing. Not just because we could be wrong, but because of the things that we’re willing to do to people who disagree with us when we have a monopoly on truth or think we do. There’s going to take a lot of healing, I think, in science as well to get to a place where people can trust science more, trust public health, trust governments.

There’s been, at various turns, what I’ve described in the paper of the law of the excluded middle as this idea that we’re at war with each other and that we’re willing to dehumanize each other or write each other out, have people be persona non grata because we’re generally assigning more exaggerated forms. Whatever they think and believe, we’re probably thinking that they’re far less reasonable and willing to have a conversation than we are. Of course, there’s a lot of things that led to this, the whole QAnon, the timing of the QAnon activity, the storming of the state capitals. When people get violent, that generally gives other people carte blanche to be violent back to them.

Ari: Yes.

Yogi: If you are looking for an excuse to dehumanize people, if you start being violent, that’s going to do it. It’s really difficult because then you get anybody else who’s questioning non-dominant or yes, questioning dominant narratives and doing research on other issues that are really important to integrate with that, there’s a tendency to clump in those, you could say, sincere mild skeptics. I don’t even like the word skeptic because they’re just pointing out other aspects of the same picture that are not being examined or not being chosen to be examined in the dominant discourse.

Yes, it’s a difficult time, I would say, for science in general. We have a lot of work to do to re-earn the public’s trust. I don’t think that’s going to happen overnight. I think that it’s going to take many forms, but we have to realize everybody has different opinions. Even if you had two people who were very skeptical of, say, lockdowns and the necessity or impact or the desirability of them, showing that through traditional academic means, they’re not going to believe the same thing. If we treat them as believing the same thing, that’s going to further ostracize them, further put them in a different epistemic community. You have groupthink in various directions. We have different collectives of groupthink. It doesn’t help anything because it makes us all more wrong.