Collaborating for Change: Protecting Scientists from Industry Intimidation

This article first appeared in the 2025 Commonweal Year-End Magazine.
‍View this article and more by [ clicking here ] to explore the full magazine.

_________

In the 1990s, an anonymous whistleblower brought documents from inside the tobacco industry to the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). The documents were put into circulation at the UCSF library. These courageous acts offered a first public glimpse into the industry’s efforts to influence public perception of tobacco’s effect on human health, sparking decades of litigation and greater transparency into tobacco and, eventually, other industries. With the help of a group of USCF and other organizations including Commonweal’s Collaborative for Health and Environment (CHE), the library has evolved into the UCSF Industry Documents Library. In January 2025, the Center to End Corporate Harm was formed, an alliance of researchers committed to using the library to highlight ways corporations undermine public health.

Today, in a time when strong, independent science is more important than ever—and industry intimidation is a real threat to understanding how chemicals in our world actually affect our health—CHE has taken on an initiative to amplify the library’s resources and to help researchers counter intimidation from corporate actors. Since 2002, Commonweal’s CHE has been working to translate the latest research into actionable programs, policies, and practices through webinars, forums, partnerships, and collaborations—like the collaboration that resulted in the Center to End Corporate Harm.

Lisa Bero is an active participant in this CHE initiative. A professor at the School of Medicine at UCSF in the 1990s, Lisa was one of the first people that looked at the tobacco industry documents when they became available.

“It was astounding to me: they were flooding the market with fake studies, and aggressively countering real studies,” she said. “These documents were groundbreaking: the research community—and the public—had never seen anything like this before.”

Lisa went on to dedicate her career to developing and validating methods for assessing bias in the design, conduct, and dissemination of research on pharmaceuticals, tobacco, and chemicals. She is currently a professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

The UCSF library has been influential in her work to inform other researchers about the coordinated strategies that industries have used to suppress data on the harm of certain chemicals or to inflate data on their usefulness.

Two years ago, CHE hosted a webinar with researchers who had successfully pushed back against pesticide industry pressure. The conversation led to an initiative to help researchers who are studying the impact of chemicals on human health to be able to respond effectively when intimidated by corporate actors.

CHE Director Kristin Schafer says that they started by researching what resources were available already, and found that there was support for climate researchers, but few resources for researchers studying the impacts of toxic chemicals.

“We decided to jump in to help support these scientists,” Kristin said. “We organized two convenings, bringing together leading researchers at all points in their careers—and from those conversations we developed a comprehensive menu of what’s needed to help support researchers who experience this kind of intimidation.”

Kristin points out that young researchers are targeted in very specific ways. They may get heckled at conferences where they’re presenting their findings, or be recruited to lucrative industry internships so they don’t continue their research documenting the harms of chemicals. Both of the experiences can be very isolating and traumatic. There is also pressure on administration officials at universities to unseat both young and more established professors if they publish findings that degrade confidence in widely used chemicals—so-called “commercially inconvenient research.”

CHE’s initiative is working to provide good information to journalists so that they understand what can be claimed as confidential business information, know about resources like the Industry Documents Library, and are armed with the best ways to ask questions to flush out bias. They are also working further upstream, looking for collaboration with environmental health science and journalism schools, creating public discussions that shine light on the issues.

They are also beginning to work on science communications toolkits requested by researchers—highlighting which messages land most effectively for talking about chemicals and human health.

In coming years, Kristin says that they hope to do even more. They plan to identify universities that excel at protecting their researchers under fire and share those tactics and policies, and to elevate existing awards that are already given to celebrate researchers doing courageous research.

They plan to create guidelines and support for researchers who want to be expert witnesses or affect policy through the legal system.

“This past year, I’m proud that we have been making great strides to provide researchers working on chemicals and health a place to gather and strategize,” she said. “We want to shine a light on the problem of industry pressure on researchers—and offer a safe space for scientists working on these issues to collaborate to protect scientific integrity.”

_________

Photo credits: Unsplash