25 May 1999
GOVERNMENT AND CORPORATE INTERESTS CENSOR SCIENCE REPORTING
Government collusion with corporate interests often leads to the censorship of stories about science which are of public concern, writes
"INDEX on Censorship" in this month's cover feature (No. 3/1999.) In "INDEX", Gregory Palast describes how information that would be damaging to the Monsanto Company, a biogenetics corporation, has been censored, such as the link between cancer and one of Monsanto's products. The bovine growth hormone, bovine somatotropin (BST), which increases a cow's milk production by 15 percent, was shown in a test to "cause breast and prostate cancers in humans," according to "INDEX". Yet, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which approved BST in 1993, "refused to release the study's data on the grounds it would harm Monsanto's commercial interests," writes Palast.
The study revealing the cancer link to BST remained hidden until, "after years of requests, Canadian government scientists finally obtained the data," writes Palast. Those six scientists, who revealed their findings to their superiors, "found themselves reassigned, demoted and silenced" until the Canadian Senate provided them immunity last year for their testimony. In a sidebar, Palast explains how lawyers for the British newspaper the "Observer" recommended he censor most of his reports, some about Monsanto. Palast notes that his publisher was the only one to dare to even report on Monsanto. He admits that he often practised self-censorship in his work, a tactic he calls "the most invidious form of censorship" in Western Europe. He writes, "its greater evil [is] perpetuating the pleasant myth that we live in societies where free expression and open discourse are untrammeled."
In another article in "INDEX" entitled "A paradigm under pressure", Gordon Stewart exposes censorship of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) research. He and other researchers have done studies which dispute the commonly-accepted beliefs that AIDS is caused solely by the Human Immune Virus (HIV), an opinion pronounced publicly by a US secretary of state in 1984; and that AIDS was pervasive in the general population and on the verge of causing a global epidemic when it was first discovered. Once these opinions were accepted in the public domain, Stewart says, all other research about the source or spread of AIDS was dismissed or censored. He writes, "all dissent began to be suppressed by anonymous censorship which became absolute, amazingly pervasive and apparently immune from disclosure of conflicts of interests." For example, while working as a consultant to the World Health Organization (WHO), Stewart "found no evidence whatsoever in 1987 that AIDS was being transmitted heterosexually in general populations except in headline propaganda about the scare of AIDS internationally." However, he subsequently found that "although the data and opinions that he offered to the WHO received attention internally, they were barred from publication."
Since 1990, all the most prominent science publications, such as "Nature", "Science", the "New England Journal of Medicine," the "British Medical Journal" and the "Lancet", have refused to publish research articles pointing to these conclusions, whether by Stewart or other researchers. His appearances on television, including on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), in the United Kingdom have been cancelled. "The censorship maintained by the international consensus of experts in the main research councils, learned societies, official committees and WHO is unyielding; so also are the main channels in radio, television and the press," he writes. While Stewart has encountered censorship of scientific research before, he says the censorship surrounding AIDS research is unprecedented. Stewart concludes that divergent views on AIDS are censored because "many bodies and individuals receive high rewards for their work within orthodox AIDS science. Underlying much of this, the pharmaceutical companies have their own obvious agenda."
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