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RE: Follow the money. nt

The thing is, while a minority of scientists can be pressured or corrupted (20%, according to one study I read about), you can't subborn everyone in a field, and such is the nature of science that it takes only one scientist to overthrow established dogma. So from what I've seen, the worst that can be done is to keep scientific results from the public for a while.

The tobacco companies, forex, suppressed their own research on the addictiveness of tobacco, but within a few years scientists working independently discovered it. The delay here was, I think, due to a difference in resources: the tobacco companies had vast funds to throw at research. Similarly, the drug companies have in recent years repeatedly tried to suppress or underplay research on the side effects of the drugs they sell -- but they've repeatedly been caught in the act. Once independent researchers have repeated the experiments or gained access to and analyzed the original data, their nasty little subterfuge ends.

Other sources of error seem to be countered rapidly, e.g., fudged data and outright frauds like Piltsdown Man.

What I think is more likely to happen is that a result will "sit on the shelf" either because of inadequate evidence, or because no one thinks to question it. The cold-bloodedness of dinosaurs is an example of the latter, it was accepted for almost a century before someone thought to re-examine the evidence and discovered that they weren't cold blooded at all. AGW is an example of the former, it took almost 100 years before computers became powerful enough to establish the theory. So too for plate tectonics, which was rejected for many years by geologists because there was no known mechanism whereby it could occur.

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