the university of california san francisco has a web site with the pages of documents and they are wonderful to read. how do i get to this? excuse me.

okay, among the things the debaca industry did was publish their own journals. they put out journals, they put out newspapers and magazines, the also scientists and physicians in the memos that describe them was clear. focus on controversy, anything that raises questions about studies are what you should promote and the link to the mall to our web site, depending signs that organic is worth reading because they really are remarkable. was extraordinarily 60 campaign for many, many years. hill and nelson then went on to market their expertise much more widely. this is what is much less well known. alta the '70s and '80s into the '90s when different industries, different corporations were faced crises around environmental exposures.

dillon milton went to them and said we can help you. was able to obtain documents around essentially their sales pitch since i worked at the energy department was was the primary user roundy anna. essentially hill and knolton described how they were successfully able to help not just the tobacco industry but in their literature they never mention tobacco because it already was so tainted that how they help other industries and they put out a series of case studies which i posted as well. this was around fluorocarbons or free on as the this battle-- that are none dominik you will recall there were signs them in the 1970's suggesting that the release of fluorocarbons which were in come essentially used in as a propellant in aerosol cans, was causing a hole in the ozone layer. additional studies confirmed this and is hill in olden explain, public concern and fear about the future cause of

fluorocarbon users to look to alternatives. there were as by dupont to help calm fears coming and the net to two or three years before the government took action. and it did and that is how they were successful in putting off action until dupont could replace a chemical so they did not lose market share. and of course the scientists who did that work received the nobel prize and the science was not bad science are anything but the scientists did the work, showing chlorofluorocarbons were the cause of the problem. but you can see essentially what happened. the public relations industry found out how they could sell this elsewhere but-- i believe by scientists themselves, who saw that this was a lucrative endeavor and rather than let hill and knolton figure out how to do this the scientists themselves were setting up their own firms and out of this we have this new industry, which is

called, they themselves called the private defense industry. scientist to understand how the regulatory system works out to produce studies that the finn products in regulation or in court, they will produce literature reviews, gather analyses and interpretations. occasionally, they will do studies themselves but it is all in my view very questionable value. the studies these firms produced for their clients are very much like the accounting work done by some of the accountants at arthur andersen for the enron companies. the appeared to play by the rules but their objective is to help corporations frustrate regulators and prevail in litigation. we see it over and over again in this case. i am going to talk a little bit about how this works. the one group, tried to write about several of these groups.

one group worked extensively for the tobacco industry in places where the tobacco industry did not feel like they expose themselves so that the weinrich group to it. this is what they are marketing material asbestos pharmaceutic kurds, we are all mix. they will go to the company and say look what happened was best is, look what happened to debaca. it is a good thing those things happened in my view of course, and the thing they stress is the chemicals should have presumptive innocence, that they should be innocent until proven guilty and they are the advocates, the defense attorneys for the chemicals and they will make sure they are not found guilty. this is an example, this was on the wonder group's web site intel fibro an article in the scientific america and it pulled this case study from the web site. now, i think those of you will follow the food and drug administration know that the fda

essentially forces a drug off the market for one of two reasons and they have to be pretty good reasons. one if it is shown the drug simply does not work. the other thing, it's the fda shows that the risk associated with the drug badly up with the benefits. obviously all drugs have chris but of the benefits are small and the rest are great they will after a great deal of turmoil force the drug of the market. the fda proposed translation of registered drug that requires a hearing etc., the weinberg grouper lead to ten additional years of sales before the translation-- cancellation of the traxel whatever this drug was did not work, we had ten additional years thanks to the weinberg group. now they by the way, since i wrote this book, to tell you about the defense industry they have changed their web site. they now call their work private

support but i saved all of those screen shots too. i think it hurts all of this, and dill. understand this as well-- people see this all signs turning to scientists because we are being seen like the accountants at arthur andersen. i want to give one case example of something which i became deeply involved with. i was teaching about it when i was teaching environmental health policy george washington university. o'shea issued a proposed chromium standards. chromium is a chemical commonly used in the workplace, hayden medal extremely toxic, 100 years ago come 80 years ago factory workers would take the time come up put it up one nostril and pull it out the other because chromium exposure cost nasal perforations. it is a terrible condition

unfortunately by the 1940's art that these it was under control and we stop seeing those but it was discovered in the '50s that chromium exposure increase the risk of lung cancer. it is a very powerful loung carcinogen. osha had never got the rental updating their workplace protection standard which had been based on preventing these holes in people's noses. based on 1920's studies, and osha many people have pushed for osha to an issue a new standard. finally they were sued by the chemical union and the research group and lost in court several times. but, it became clear in the 1990's to the chromium industry that its some point osha is going to strengthen its standards to protect its workers. the environmental protection agency did a study of its factory in baltimore not to learn more about how to protect workers but because this was a public health problem across the board. if people were exposed to

chromium, the only way we could learn about it was by studying workers. the challenge to the chromium industry said we may start to have to clean up our factories. they hired some veterans that i call the tobacco works, some of the same scientist to work for tobacco who cut their teeth questioning signs come studies for the tobacco companies met with chromium industry executives and i will tell you how i got these documents little bit later in they came up with a strategy. they critique the studies done by a famous scientist named mancuso. with to make sure we got-- we could see the peer review literature with other sorts of critiques and read you saying this line cancer problem is not real and we try to get the raw data from the epa studies of pekid re annalistic nascently to make the results go way. they have this meeting in 1996 where they talked about doing that. they decided in this is

interesting to watch, they said we will hire this company, a couple of scientists from a company called cameras, but then they decided that if the chromium industry hires them of the my people to get ahold of some of their raw data in their memos, so they decide to use another trick they learned from tobacco, have their attorneys hired the scientist because then all the work is considered privileged through various legal structures, and all that stuff would be prohibited from getting out to the public. we have all these contracts on our web site. chromium-- their use in the back. he was with the environmental protection agency at the time, a very good study of this and found not surprisingly increased one cancer risk of people exposed to chromium and the question of the regulatory interested people were exposed

at 1 microgram per cubic meter they had excess risk of lung cancer. the old standard was 52 micrograms per cubic meter so even that 1 microgram, people exposed for their lifetime at that level would develop an increased risk of lung cancer so powerful evidence. they tried to get ahold of this study epa was doing to get the raw data but they could not do it so what they did and this was fascinating because there were essentially trying to stop this lawsuit, to force the osha standard, the invented a simulated population and then conducted a study on it. they said on the basis of what we know about this, this is what we think the work should look like and they concluded there was no risk of lung cancer. well, then eventually, through freedom of information act they were able to get the raw data and of course they did another epidemiological alchemy in the results go away and they

conclude workers were never exposed above the current permissible exposure, did not experience long cancer excess risk. fortunately judge back here in philadelphia who died not so long ago said that is nonsense and threw it out. this is the only health standard that the bush administration, osha has actually issued and there were forced to by a federal judge who happens to be republican, dairy upstanding judge. the required osha to issue new standards. osha extended 1 microgram come as the still up the levels the studies done would be increased risk of lung cancer but far lot better than the level of 52. at when michael graham they figured out you can still get 71 cancer deaths for every 1,000 workers but of these they were better. osha said please give us anybody who has information about workers exposed to low levels because of the studies were done on old factories where people

had higher levels of exposure. industry use this as a way to say, these old studies are not relevant. the new factories are much cleaner. you cannot go forward until you have the studies of the new factories, so the national association of manufacturers a great supporter of workers' rights, complaint untold oh shut, osher is relying on 3250-year-old exposure profiles. osha only relies-- osha can should continue to study the effects of lower levels. more study come amora steady come tomorrow steady. justice the common period was closing, i was fascinated by this because it is a great teaching opportunity. i read the study that frankly was a piece of garbage, and the conclusion is there was no, the absence of elevated lung cancer risk may be a favorable reflection of the changing environment.

researchers looked at one of these new factories. of course they had not looked for people very long, so you could not draw conclusions but they tried to pretend that this shows that there is no real risk from low-level exposure. this is thought. it was funded by the chromium chemical health and environment subcommittee of the industrial health foundation. what is that? late one night i did some googling in just by luck because something was only on the web for a brief period with the bankruptcy hearing in pittsburgh and there was a fight over some chromium files that were determined were actually file cabinets and-- use the federal court system and got the data from that. we found just by cold calling the various creditors in this bankruptcy case, a whole trove of information including, and this was most remarkable, a study done by the chromium industry of those low-level exposures, an excellent study

looking at four facilities where people let low-level exposure in finding, and this is sort of a slide for people, but people with fairly low levels of exposures, their lifetime exposure 1.6 micrograms per year, a little higher than the osha was talking about, had a fivefold risk of lung cancer in people at higher levels had a 20 fuld excess risk. this is a while finding, not surprising, but here was the industry claiming you can't afford because you don't have the studies. they have the study and they sat there 11 days of hearings with osha never mentioning the study existed so of course i gave it to the pierre laureate at the research group who had originally filed the petition with osha and he sent it in and osha put all the information into the osha docket and osha said thank you very much but it did not affect their conclusions.

a second study came out before by the crimean industry of a german cohort were also the essentially conclude that loung cancer risk is elevated only in the highest exposure group. and other words we don't need this new study. we realized what happened here with the industry had taken the old steady which showed a very powerful effect at the regulatory a level of regulatory interest close to the level that osha, divided the studies up, change the analysis, published to studies neither of which showed any thing and here is the interesting thing. instead of having a five fuld access thale limited diem intermediate crude, compared that to the high group. all of a sudden the effect of low level goes away. only by essentially finding this trove of documents and reading the study was i able to figure this out. a number of attorneys had read it but they never put two and two together.

this is the sort of thing you see more and more and more of. we publish this and of course by the end, osha pulled back instead of pushing for a 1 microgram standard raise the to five and gave the-- level 25 so and that this of minister eshing can go on record as never issuing import and health standards on chromium. that is one set of issues around doing these. be the thing i want to talk about is the interpretation of studies. in some ways this is more insidious and i will make the case here that scientists with an interest can't be trusted to provide a reasonable interpretation of scientific data and i talk about this all for the buck and we have it all under web site. let's talk about vioxx. the government knows-- biax was approved by the fda in 1999. when you go back and look at

this you can see in the early days the for studies that were done led them to conflicting interpretation but not so conflicting when we look at independent scientists disagreed with mark scientists. benchley the truth was reached because in this case the for studies involving biax involve comparing biax to leave ornack person because essentially they were done as a painkiller, but later study was done comparing biax to a placebo because it was assisted to see of biax traded call on polyps. so, at the very beginning, this is 2001, the journal of the american medical association published a review by three respected cardiologists to look that the data and said look, it is pretty clear the patients taking vioxx had more than twice the risk of heart attacks as the ones taking a leave.

powerful findings. merck scientists working not just for mark but paid by merck and working some of the major medical centers replied, no you conducted the studies to different ways and either vioxx is causing heart attacks are what we believe is a leave it is preventing heart attacks. now, we don't have a drug that prevents 60% of heart attacks. if we did we would put it in the water supply but they published over and over sing the difference is a believe in scargill protective. eventually the real truth came out when the trial in september 2004, hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people took vioxx in the meantime. vioxx was withdrawn from the market and by then 20 million people it taken the drug and the fda scientists estimate between 88,144,000 heart attacks occurred because of this. this is a public health

disaster. we see the same campaign, the same approach in many cases by the same scientists much more widely now. there is a famous memo from the political consultant who is now a fox news analyst and focus group leader, who wrote to the republican party and this is also the 2003, essentially saying the title of the memo was winning that global debate and overview andy wrote, very claire come the scientific debate remains open. voters believe there's no consensus about global warming with in the scientific community. should the public and to believe the scientific issues are settled there are-- their view will change therefore you need to make it a primary issue in debate. that is what is going on right now. right now there is no credible scientists who can get up and say humans are not the cause of global warming. president bush has the knowledge that humans are the cause, so we are now on global warming the

ninth 2.0. we see the same debate over the public health effects, public health impact of global warming. we saw that dr. julie gerberding was supposed to testify in front of congress and the white house took six pages out of her testimony. they moved, they have essentially moot the defense line back a little bit but will still argue over the same points. anti-see it over and over again in so many different fields. my book is filled with examples. the industry was battling to maintain the right to sell soda in sweden drinks in school so they produced a model showing that soda this not contribute to obesity. in the early days of cell phones, driving while using a cell phone would be bad, the

companies involved of telecommunications paid for a number of studies that showed that driving while holding and talking on the cell phone leads to little or no increase tissue. that is nonsense but they produce those studies. in the early days of that debate they were part of that debate. the gasoline additive, a big settlement on the contaminated water supplies across the country. the state of california classified it as a possible carcinogen, so the producers of that chemical contacted one of these companies, they produced a study showing it was not dangerous and when tom delay tried to get legislation passed the taxpayers would pick up the cost of the cleanup economists produced a study saying the cost would not be very high so congress would be more willing to buy into it. you see it over and over again and no matter how cynical you become it is never enough to keep up. i think we can do something about it.

i think there is a very clear policy direction to take this. the first one i call sarbanes-oxley for science. as it was brought in to clean up some of the outrageous filings around the securities and exchange commission, we need transparency, full disclosure and public sponsor infold minnick controlled studies, and whereas steady is done under contract that said, sponsors could publish, could look at things before they are published and there's a "new york times" publication from virginie university. that should be fully disclosed. that should not be allowed. we need equal treatment of public and private science. they are all sorts of rules regarding any study done by a federally funded research your, but industry does this study the raw data can be secret and most importantly i think we should make sure that scientists who have a financial interest cannot be on federal adviser committees

because it they are essentially we cannot trust their advice. the vioxx example is very clear, and very tragic. sling 'tis with financial conflict of interest have quoted addition. they cannot see the truth in front of them. one thing i have tried to do with the book is but these smoking guns on a web site, so people can go to the web site and download these documents and see what i'm talking about. i think they are very powerful documents that speak for themselves. i would love for you to do that and i will take some questions. [applause] >> thank you david. when we first asked for any questions from journalists in the room, as we do in washington, in a journalist's first. and then-- and then anybody with a ph.d.. [laughter]

so what we start here maam. we will be bringing the microphone around so we can get you one record. >> you mentioned transparency and disclosing conflicts of interest. to me, we are going to be using lots of men analyses, lots of systematic reviews and comparative effectiveness that is now being advocated for drugs, and by suzanne procedures boots amici transparence it would be transparency of the criteria you have used to it that day. steady t-shirt meta-analysis in lst belove that they can't judge what is going to be analyzed. >> you are absolutely right. >> i am karen. >> absolutely, i think there to issues. one is, the work that is done especially in these data syntheses meta-analysis petr take into many different studies we at to see what goes into it and what doesn't go into it, but

i think the bottom line though it is because it is such an issue of interpretation that the interpretation has to be done by scientists you don't have the financial interest. there was a huge separate couple of years ago when the national institute of health had the panel that opined on what level cholesterol should trigger taking different sorts of statin drugs, and it turns out seven out of those eight scientists who were on the panel had a financial connection to the drug makers to make the statins. and of course many people were skeptical. we can't have advice given in a way that is questionable that raises the level of skepticism. these are multi-billion dollar decisions. we can afford to hire scientists, the government can pay for scientists who have no connection, so they can look at the data independently and objectively. >> please wait for the microphone. and please identify yourself.

>> i am at the government accountability project and i am saying this in the absence of reading your but in just listening today but i wanted to address conflict of interest-- there is not really come i mean there of laws that facilitate or encourage scientists to hook up with industry for not really addressing it when you talk about the absence of conflict in research, why scientists are going for industry money. there really is an absence of federal funding there, so if you don't address that problem i think you are kind of missing an important part of why this is happening. >> it is very hard for sign sis barna to not call for federal funding of science. we talked about that-- but that at this obsolete trooper guo industry has the right to do their own studies and that is important. i am talking about the studies that going to regulation. they really do out to be done independently and obviously that has to be funded and i would like to see the government

obviously fund more things. it is not unreasonable for companies to do their own signs. i think when that happens though the rod data everything should be made available to any interested party if we are going to meet making important policy decisions on the basis of the studies. that is the bottom-line growth that i think can be implemented. xp my name is jim and i made retiree. i want to congratulate you david, for his extremely well-written book. it is a very good reading. it is a read that makes you very angry about the harm that has been done to thousands, perhaps millions of people, ruined lives, kill people. you use a number of examples in your book how the government has ceased to collect information or

stopped reporting information when they don't like the results of that information. can you give us some examples of how the administration is using science or manipulating science for their own ends today? >> thank you for asking. it is a very important question and i devote a big portion of the book to the bush administration because they have essentially taken this strategy of manufacturing and institutionalize the uncertainty. they built structures and to interagency review processes and requirements to take into account bad signs come to give producers bad science and no signs in the ability to question studies. there was one very worrisome attempt called peer review, not the peer review the scientists know about. in that most scientists did not think it had anything to do with peer review but the white house attempted to impose requirement that every federal document go through internal and extl