One bit of good news to come out of the economic crisis: the stimulus bill's $10.4 billion for biomedical and behavioral research, to be distributed through the National Institutes of Health.

The infusion of funds comes not a moment too soon: federal government funding for basic research has been essentially flat since 2005, a circumstance that has caused many a promising young researcher to seek work elsewhere.

At least $200 million will go to researchers around the country to "jumpstart" two-year projects on high priority topics.

The National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, under the new leadership of microbiologist Linda Birnbaum, plans to channel stimulus funds to a several areas identified by many researchers as urgent. Among them:

• Reducing the human body burden of chemicals and reversing the course of environmentally-triggered diseases.
• Measuring the body burden of "emerging contaminants" whose damage to o health is little understood.
• Studying the changes in genes caused by environmental exposures and how prenatal chemical exposures may reprogram genes to trigger disease later in life or even in succeeding generations.


• Evaluating risks of nanomaterials.
• Using stem cells instead of lab animals to predict toxicity of chemicals.
• Studying health effects of climate change.

Birnbaum, who spent 19 years at the Environmental Protection Agency, has said that she will preside over a much more concerted effort to explore the effects of environmental chemicals during critical stages of development - that is, the impact of chemical exposures to the fetus and infants.

That's good news because the more solid science there is, the more we will understand about how environmental factors interfere with normal development. And the better equipped we will be to protect children from subtle toxins whose damage manifests itself decades later.

The past eight years of stalled budgets for scientific research have taken their toll on our nation's research laboratories, and, very probably, our children's futures. As we often say here at EWG, we only have one chance to protect our kids' health.

Even though the global economic crisis has to be at the top of the incoming administration's agenda, President-elect Obama has signaled he isn't forgetting the other reason so many people voted for change: to do the few essential things we can't do for ourselves. As he put it in a press conference recently, "I think what the American people want more than anything is just common-sense, smart government. They don't want ideology. They don't want bickering. They don't want sniping. They want action and they want effectiveness."

That says it for all of us who believe it's past time to restore credibility to crucial government functions. Obviously, the new White House team must shore up our battered financial security. But close behind is what we at Environmental Working Group call hometown security. We need good policymakers and regulators, acting on the basis of the best science, to assure that we have pure food, clean water, clean air, safe household products, clean, reliable energy and ample jobs devoted to realizing all those basic requirements of a civilized society.

The current bunch of political appointees running the regulatory agencies don't seem to know or care that the taxpayers, not the industries they oversee, have been paying their salaries. Take the leadership at the federal Food and Drug Administration.

Please.

It's been a long time since the FDA front office could make a statement about a food or drug problem without sending our doubletalk detectors (that's the polite term) into red alert.

The latest episode to kick the meter into the red zone started with an Associated Press report last Tuesday that that the FDA had discovered traces of the industrial chemical melamine and a related compound, cyanuric acid, in a few U.S- made infant formula samples. It's hardly surprising that the story, sketchy as it was, made headlines around the globe: everybody who hasn't been living on Mars for the last couple of years knows about the massive melamine tragedy unfolding in China, caused by unscrupulous manufacturers who deliberately spiked baby formula supplies with the chemical to boost their apparent protein levels.

Melamine, a plastics component, is toxic in its own right and when combined with cyanuric acid can cause kidney stones and kidney failure. To date, according to Time Magazine, more than 60,000 Chinese babies have been sickened and at least four have died from drinking tainted formula. The scandal is still spreading as reports surface almost daily that melamine has turned up in Chinese food or animal feed exports.

The stress crack between Environmental Protection Agency and its outside science advisers just got a lot deeper. In fact, these days it looks a lot like a thousand-foot crevasse.

The proximate cause: perchlorate, a rocket fuel component, potent thyroid toxin and ubiquitous water and soil pollutant, thanks largely to improper storage at military and space installations over the past four decades. Federal government and academic scientists have detected perchlorate in the urine of every American tested, public water supplies in at least 26 states, many agricultural products and even breast milk. Based on data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Working Group has estimated that as many as 44 million women who are pregnant, thyroid deficient or have low iodine levels are at heightened risk of exposure to the chemical.

Because perchlorate disrupts the production of thyroid hormones essential to normal brain development and is especially dangerous to fetuses and newborn babies, EPA's 30-member Children's Health Protection Advisory Committee has spent two and a half years pressing the agency to crack down on perchlorate pollution in drinking water.

EPA managers said nothing until Oct. 3, when they made a surprise announcement: the chemical posed no threat to most Americans, they declared, so EPA did not need to regulate it. The decision by EPA's front office, set to become final sometime next month, represented a major victory for the Pentagon and its clients -- defense and aerospace contractors responsible for perchlorate spills and reluctant to pay clean-up costs that could mount into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Faced with what looked like a done deal, the children's health committee took the extraordinary step of posting a letter of protest on the EPA website.

Even though I spent most of my school years trying to avoid science classes as much as possible, I have to acknowledge the importance of science in the lives of people. We need science to help us understand the world around us and how things function and relate to one another.

That's why the thought of political involvement in scientific research scares me. In the ideal world, there would be no connection between the research and politics. But we all know we don't live in an ideal world, and very often science and politics are connected. In addition, the last 8 years have been less then ideal as far as government support of the science research is concerned.

The problem is big. Within last few years, there were major budget cuts at the federal agencies dealing with issues such as environment, public health and consumer safety. Many Bush administration policies have jeopardized research on those issues.

Nowadays, everything seems to be on sale. And I am not talking about the end of the season clearances in stores around us. I'm talking about how if you have enough money you can often buy what ever you want with it -- public support, freedom, education and yes, science.

Here at EWG we work extensively on science for sale issues. Our chromium fraud investigation revealed that safety standards from chromium-6 - the "Erin Brockovich" chemical - had been skewed by a cancer study that was faked by an industry scientist. We revealed the influence of industry on a Harvard professor's suppression of research on fluoride and bone cancer. We blew the whistle on corporate-cozy government contractors in the case of potent chemical Bisphenol A (BPA) and uncovered the major conflict of interest of Sciences International, a consultant that was running the federal safety review of BPA while also working for the chemical industry. As the result of our work, Congress began an investigation of corrupt contracting throughout all regulatory agencies.

But even with EWG's work and the work of other watch dog groups, the situation is still far from being resolved. The question to ask, when thinking about conflict of interest, is who is paying for it and how is that influencing the questions being asked.

BPA is a poster child chemical for funding biases. According to a recent Washington Post article by David Michaels,

"One of the eyebrow-raising statistics about the BPA studies is the stark divergence in results, depending on who funded them. More than 90 percent of the 100-plus government-funded studies performed by independent scientists found health effects from low doses of BPA, while none of the fewer than two dozen chemical-industry-funded studies did.

This striking difference in studies isn't unique to BPA. When a scientist is hired by a firm with a financial interest in the outcome, the likelihood that the result of that study will be favorable to that firm is dramatically increased. This close correlation between the results desired by a study's funders and those reported by the researchers is known in the scientific literature as the "funding effect."

Having a financial stake in the outcome changes the way even the most respected scientists approach their research. Scientists make many decisions about the doses, exposure methods and disease definitions they use in their experiments, and each decision affects the result."

Often, the scientists just plainly manipulate the results. But, according to the Michaels, sometimes close examination of those studies shows that they are comparable in the quality of data and sometimes even better. The puzzle is then, how does that happen?

There are many ways to manipulate the science when the industry is paying the tab--the scientist might not be asking the questions they should be asking; industry funded studies might also be designed to create certain results (and not show some others); as the case with Sciences International and BPA analysis shows, there could be industry presence in choosing the scientific literature that could have big impact on conclusions and so on.

Corporate sponsorship of science should stop once and for all. With the global increases of diseases, public health is not something that should be taken lightly. And there should be no price tag attached to it.

Reprinted from CSPI's Integrity in Science Watch:

Proctor & Gamble has launched a massive advertising blitz to counter consumer fears about the rising death toll from poisoned pet food. The firm took out 59 full-page ads in daily newspapers, with most citing reassurances from an independent task force. What P&G didn’t mention in the ads for Iams and Eukanuba products was that most of the task force members have financial ties to the P&G subsidiaries, according to Advertising Age:

“Of the seven veterinarians on the panel, three have appeared as endorsers in ads for Iams, another is affiliated with Veterinary Pet Insurance (a company with which Iams has a promotional partnership), another was a speaker at an Iams-sponsored symposium in February, another is a former Iams employee, and the last is a past recipient of a five-year research grant from Iams.”

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Last month, when BP (formerly British Petroleum) announced a $500 million partnership with UC Berkeley for biofuels research, the company was hailed as a leader in pushing the oil industry toward cleaner energy. University officials were jubilant over the deal, which would establish Cal – and the Bay Area, where venture capitalists are funding energy startups at a level unseen since the early Web days – as a world center of alternative-energy research and development.

But a few weeks on, not everyone is happy with the shotgun marriage between the nation's most prestigious public university and the world's third-largest oil company. Berkeley faculty and students are asking loudly and impolitely if the Energy Biosciences Institute will be a vehicle for independent research that produces technological and policy change, or for BP to to greenwash its well-earned image as a notorious global polluter.

On a campus known for '60s-style dissent, Berkeley students have staged teach-ins and demonstrations, including a direct action in which protesters in BP lab coats poured gallons of black, sticky "oil" – later found to be organic molasses – at the entrance to California Hall.