Pharmaceutical companies can't market unapproved or "off-label" uses for their prescription drugs, under U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rules. But the same companies' medical science liaisons (MSLs), "who are considered medical rather than sales staff, have greater freedom than salespeople as they visit doctors offices to discuss the science behind a medicine, including unapproved uses," reports the Wall Street Journal. Moreover, the number of industry MSLs is increasing. Dr. Jane Chin, a former MSL for Aventis and Takeda Pharmaceuticals, quit after being "pressured to do more for the sales team. ... Some pharma companies have the impression if you just hire somebody [with a professional degree] and you call them an MSL, it doesn't matter what they say." She now heads the MSL Institute, which provides ethical training. Novartis, "which has one of the largest MSL staffs in the industry," says it buffers its MSLs from marketing pressures by not giving MSLs "incentives for sales in their territories." The FDA allows "drug companies to respond to unsolicited requests for information from doctors, including off-label data, if they provide truthful, nonpromotional material."

According to ExxonMobil's 2008 Corporate Citizenship Report and Worldwide Giving Report, the oil giant is still funding global warming skeptics. Following an unprecedented rebuke from Britain's Royal Society in 2006, Exxon said it would stop funding -- in the Society's words -- groups that have "misrepresented the science of climate change." However, Exxon funding is still flowing to the Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory, the home of skeptics Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas. Baliunas "built her denial career downplaying the significance of the destruction of the ozone layer," at the George C. Marshall Institute, an Exxon-funded think tank. Soon has "become one of the go-to skeptics, appearing as a key speaker" at the Heartland Institute's conferences questioning climate change. Though the "Observatory is the research arm of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics," writes Greenpeace's Kert Davies, it "has little to do with either the Smithsonian or Harvard," while "Smithsonian has distanced itself from Baliunas, who discredits their name."

In September 2001, the George C. Marshall Institute, a Washington D.C. think tank, appointed Matthew B. Crawford as its Executive Director. At the time, the think tank boasted that Crawford had "won numerous academic fellowships, including the Bradley Fellowship, The H.B. Earhart Fellowship, and the University of Chicago Century Fellowship; he was the John M. Olin Postdoctoral Fellow in the Committee on Social Thought." The think tank, which has long promoted the work of prominent climate change skeptics, claims that it provides "unbiased technical analyses on a range of public policy issues." However, Crawford recently wrote that "certain perversities became apparent as I settled into the job. It sometimes required me to reason backward, from desired conclusion to suitable premise. The organization had taken certain positions, and there were some facts it was more fond of than others. As its figurehead, I was making arguments I didn't fully buy myself. Further, my boss seemed intent on retraining me according to a certain cognitive style -- that of the corporate world, from which he had recently come. This style demanded that I project an image of rationality but not indulge too much in actual reasoning."

The pharmaceutical company Merck "paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles -- most of which presented data favorable to Merck products." The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine carried "ads for Fosamax, a Merck drug for osteoporosis, and Vioxx" and "appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship." Merck's marketing ploy was unearthed as part of the Australian Vioxx lawsuits. The publisher, Elsevier, admits "that the journals in question didn't have appropriate disclosures." A member of the journal's "Honorary Editorial Board," Australian rheumatologist Peter Brooks, has worked with Merck, Pfizer and Amgen, and put his name on "a few advertorials" for drug companies. "I'm sure many a primary care physician was given literature from Merck that said, 'As published in the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, Fosamax outperforms all other medications,'" a Bioethics.net blog states. "If physicians would not lend their names or pens to these efforts, and publishers would not offer their presses, these publications could not exist."

An internal document (pdf) of the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) -- an industry front group that disbanded in 2002 -- reveals that when the group chose to promote doubt about the reality of global warming it was ignoring the views of its own scientific advisers. In a backgrounder distributed to members of Congress and journalists in the 1990s, the GCC stated that “the role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood," though it added the qualifier that scientists disagreed on the issue. However, an internal document obtained as part of a court action against the automobile industry indicates that the GCC's advisers disagreed. '“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” they wrote.

The core of the small global network of global warming skeptics are once more gathering at a conference organized by the Heartland Institute, a corporate and foundation funded think tank based in Chicago. In their ad (pdf) promoting the conference, Heartland claims that those attending will be "calling attention to new research that contradicts claims that Earth’s moderate warming during the twentieth century primarily was man-made and has reached crisis proportions."

The list of speakers and free-market think tanks co-sponsoring the conference provides a reasonably comprehensive guide to the most active of the remaining global warming skeptics. We are aiming to ensure that there are reasonably detailed profiles on the most prominent of the speakers at the conference and at least a 'stub' page in SourceWatch on each of the speakers and sponsoring think tanks. (A stub page need only comprise a sentence or two and some basic formatting, but the more comprehensive it is the better.) Once created, the new page will be indexed by Google and other search engines and quickly rise to near the top of search results. Once it's high up in the search results, the article will serve as a quick reference resource for interested citizens and journalists. You don't need to be an expert on climate change policy -- we have created a guide to the sorts of information that will be useful.

If you would like to help, go to the project page and follow the steps set out in the notes. Have fun, and thanks for your help!

"Biotechnology companies are keeping university scientists from fully researching the effectiveness and environmental impact of the industry’s genetically modified crops, according to an unusual complaint issued by a group of those scientists," reports Andrew Pollack. Because GM crops are considered "intellectual property" of the companies that sell them, researchers need permission from the company to plant them, even for research purposes. In their complaint, the scientists say that sometimes companies deny that permission is withheld or insist on reviewing any findings before they can be published. "If a company can control the research that appears in the public domain, they can reduce the potential negatives that can come out of any research," said Ken Ostlie, one of the scientists who signed the statement. The scientists warn that "No truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions."

A new study found that there is a higher health cost associated with corn-based biofuels than with traditional energy forms. The researchers "found the total environmental and health costs of gasoline are about 71 cents (50p) per gallon, while an equivalent amount of corn-ethanol fuel has associated costs of 72 cents to $1.45, depending on how it is produced." The health concerns include "increased cases of heart disease, respiratory symptoms, asthma, chronic bronchitis or premature death." There is also concern that using a food crop for fuel will continue to drive up the cost of foodstuffs, affecting everyone, but especially the most vulnerable populations. There is evidence that the costs associated with the next generation of biofuels could be much lower. Those products may be produced from organic waste or plants that are grown on non-agricultural land.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted to strengthen protections for whistleblowers, especially those that work for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and in other areas of national security. The bill would "create specific protections for those who expose abuses of authority by those trying to manipulate or censor scientific research in federal agencies for political purposes." The Bush administration was accused of censoring or burying information to suit its political goals. The bill is part of the economic stimulus package, and lawmakers see it as a way to ensure that there will be many eyes watching how the billions of dollars are managed and spent. One of the bill's sponsors, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, said that "we need to make sure these funds are effectively spent and that they are not lost due to any waste, fraud or abuse."