Pardon me while I rant against a pet peeve. Since the answer to the OP’s question was a short and swift “no”, posters decided not to let it go but to take a step sideways and discuss a different issue while still pretending to adhere to the reason for the thread.
Of course, public information, public knowledge, and public opinion about science can be influenced, diminished, perverted, or repressed. The opposition can come top down from religious institutions, totalitarian governments, and corporations with competing interests, or bottom up from loudly vocal skeptics and deniers. The shift can be brief or long-term, a mild annoyance or criminally harmful.
Also of course, the attacks on science are hugely important to recognize and publicize. In a different thread with the right OP.
While your purity of essence is admirable, I submit that those responding to the OP have indeed comprehensively and usefully addressed “the idea that scientists or corporations can completely suppress, or control the rate of, scientific progress.”
I am swimming against the tide of the entire Doper culture and, for that matter, the internet itself. I don’t expect to make progress. Nevertheless, curmudgeons must occasionally curmudge.
But could everyone please stop using the term “repressed”? Other words would be more suitable.
In the case of Lung cancer, it wasnt “They” it was Big Tobacco.
Tobacco companies knew that cigarette smoke contained radioactive alpha particles for more than four decades and developed “deep and intimate” knowledge of these particles’ cancer-causing potential, but they deliberately kept their findings from the public, according to a new study by UCLA researchers.
The analysis of dozens of previously unexamined internal tobacco industry documents, made available in 1998 as the result of a legal settlement, reveals that the industry was aware of cigarette radioactivity some five years earlier than previously thought and that tobacco companies, concerned about the potential lung cancer risk, began in-depth investigations into the possible effects of radioactivity on smokers as early as the 1960s.
“The documents show that the industry was well aware of the presence of a radioactive substance in tobacco as early as 1959,” the authors write. “Furthermore, the industry was not only cognizant of the potential ‘cancerous growth’ in the lungs of regular smokers, but also did quantitative radiobiological calculations to estimate the long-term lung radiation absorption dose of ionizing alpha particles emitted from cigarette smoke.”
This study examines the history of the cigarette controversy using the tobacco documents as a roadmap to explore the following four questions: (a) What did tobacco companies know about the health risks of smoking and when did they know it? (b) What evidence is there that tobacco companies conspired to deliberately mislead the public about the health risks of smoking? (c) How were scientists involved in the cigarette controversy? (d) Have tobacco companies changed the way they do business since signing the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement? The tobacco companies knew and for most part accepted the evidence that cigarette smoking was a cause of cancer by the late 1950s. The documents also reveal that the tobacco companies helped manufacture the smoking controversy by funding scientific research that was intended to obfuscate and prolong the debate about smoking and health.
Now if you want to nitpick and say that was not “repression” but an attempt to hide and confuse the issue- well fine. But it works out to the same as far as lung cancer goes. And the OP also said "
That was a meta analysis, in other words, they relied upon other studies for their conclusions.
But even so-
In conclusion, analysis of data from the literature suggests that HFCS is associated with a higher level of CRP compared to sucrose, and that little differences exist in other anthropometric and metabolic parameters. Nonetheless, considering the limitations of the study, careful interpretation of the results is warranted. Future studies are needed to address the limitations above, particularly related to gender-mediated differences. However, the present work successfully provided a reliable estimate of the effect and difference of HFCS and sucrose in a number of anthropometric and metabolic parameters.
And one of the studies they relied upon- Affiliations
1Sugar Nutrition UK, Somerset House, Strand, London, UK.
which is funded by UK sugar manufacturers.
and another study “This work was supported in part with funding from Pepsico, Inc.”
So yea, the Meta study was apparently free of funding bias, but not so the studies they relied upon.
49 references in the systematic review and meta-analysis, and you cherry-picked two you think are untrustworthy because one study got partial funding from Pepsico and the other had an author affiliated with a sugar manufacturer, which would have had reason for bias against HCFS.
This is absolutely mandatory reading. I keep saying “Just when I thought Trump couldn’t sink any lower …” and this is another prime example. Trump is killing scientific research in the US, turning federal science funding into Trumpist political machinations. Destroying art and culture by ruining the Kennedy Center is nothing compared to this!
