Episode 4: Commercial influence on science with Lisa Bero

Money Power Health with Nason Maani

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Money Power Health.

As you know, this podcast is about money, and power, and the role they play in shaping population health. I am particularly interested in the commercial determinants of health, the activities of the private sector, and the structures it operates in, that shape health directly and indirectly.

One of the values of taking a commercial determinants lens to these issues, is that it allows us to consider commonalities in commercial incentives, strategies and tactics. A key example of this, is considering commercial influence on science and the generation of knowledge.

That is what the topic of todays podcast is, and for this I am joined by Professor Lisa Bero. She is a Professor of Medicine and Public Health, and Chief Scientist at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado. She is Senior Editor, Research Integrity for the Cochrane Collaboration, and was co-chair of the Cochrane Governing Board from 2014-2019. She has pioneered the use of internal industry documents and transparency databases to understand corporate tactics and motives for research influence, and has developed a range of qualitative and quantitative methods for assessing bias in the design, conduct and dissemination of research. She also kindly contributed a chapter on industry influence on research for our book, the commercial determinants of health, published by Oxford University Press.

In the podcast we talk about how she got interested in this area of research, some of her findings on the cycle of commercial bias in research, the impact of this work, how to communicate it to scientists and to the public, and of course, some advice for early career researchers.

You can find more about her work here: https://www.cuanschutz.edu/centers/bioethicshumanities/facultystaff/lisa-bero-phd

And some of the work she mentions with Alice Fabbri is here:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30157979/

Here is an example of the use of meta knowledge research, in the context of research on the health effects of salt: https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/45/1/251/2363485

The music for this podcast was composed and recorded by Daniel Maani. You can find out more about his music here:

https://youtalktoomuch.band