Conflicts of Interest in the Publication of Science

Allegations that greed and conflicts of interest are eroding the integrity of the scientific community¹—a community funded with billions of federal dollars—have led the government to turn a vigilant eye toward the uses and potential abuses of scientific research. In response to such scrutiny, the US Public Health Service proposed guidelines to prevent conflicts of interest from interfering with federally funded research. The guidelines required all investigators involved in research funded by the National Institutes of Health—as well as their spouses and dependent children—to disclose "all financial interests and outside professional activities."² After facing "a firestorm of protest,"³ the Public Health Service scrapped the guidelines, though it still hopes to develop new ones that do not disturb the research community so violently. This reaction was best expressed by Hittelman,⁴ who criticized the "insidious assumption that seems to underlie the guidelines: that the university biomedical research