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Corporate Bought University Research Suspect

Occasionally customers will ask about the validity of Private Company commissioned, university studies that appear to validate or endorse ABC's (insert Company Name Here) new and exciting or "mine is better than yours...." corrosion control product.

The Kept University is a great published article about how corporations are increasingly turning universities into cheap biased research labs. Marketing departments then use the results to exclaim, my technology is better, faster, more effective, etc. etc. blah, blah, blah, then the competitors product(s). Companies give researchers stock options for conducting research on product development, censor negative reviews, and see a much higher rate of positive reviews.....

Excerpts from The The Kept University:

In higher education today corporations not only sponsor a growing amount of research -- they frequently dictate the terms under which it is conducted. Professors, their image as unbiased truth-seekers notwithstanding, often own stock in the companies that fund their work. ...

In the summer of 1996 four researchers working on a study of calcium channel blockers -- frequently prescribed for high blood pressure -- quit in protest after their sponsor, Sandoz, removed passages from a draft manuscript...

...the company threatened to sue, citing a confidentiality agreement that forbade Kern to expose "trade secrets." ...

...In a study of 800 scientific papers published in a range of academic journals, Sheldon Krimsky, a professor of public policy at Tufts University and a leading authority on conflicts of interest, found that slightly more than a third of the authors had a significant financial interest in their reports. Michael McCarthy, an editor at the British medical journal The Lancet, says such links are now so common that he "often can't find anyone who doesn't have a financial interest"

Read the entire article at Colorado University The Kept University

In this industry of corrosion control, the report clearly demonstrates the advantage of using independent labs and various independent sources for testing and evaluation of industrial products.