Paul Alper points us to this news report that states:
Two New York University (NYU) professors were recently found to have collaborated directly with executives from the vaping company Juul without disclosing these relationships to academic journals or Congress. This revelation came to light during a STAT investigation. At a time when the youth vaping crisis was at its peak, these professors, David Abrams and Ray Niaura, emerged as authoritative voices defending vaping as an effective public health strategy for adults to cut back or quit smoking, despite its growing popularity among youth.
David Abrams, a frequent commentator on vaping in the news media, coordinated extensively with Juul on public messaging in 2017 and 2018. He asked Juul officials for talking points, allowed company executives to review an academic article before publishing, and attended Juul scientific advisory board meetings—all without disclosing these connections to journal publishers or the public.
Ray Niaura was also involved in collaborating with Juul executives but did not disclose these relationships.
Alper asks:
Do some people have a secret death wish? Do Abrams and Niaura not realize that their public utterances will be scrutinized? Yet once again, all that fuss over Francesca Gino’s supposed manipulations do not compare with what harm is being done in other fields involving cancer and cancer causing products.
I have two responses.
1. Researchers have seriously damaged their reputation by working for cigarette companies, even without any suggestion of research misconduct or hidden conflicts or interest. Two prominent examples are R. A. Fisher and Donald Rubin, both of whom have been hugely influential in statistics and many applied fields, and remain very respected, but still come off looking pretty foolish for their notorious edgelord positions on smoking and health (for example, here’s Fisher referring to anti-smoking campaigns as “terrorist propaganda,” and I personally heard Rubin argue that smoking is not addictive). For some reason, prominent statistician Ingram Olkin isn’t so notorious in this regard, perhaps because he just took cigarette money and kept quiet about it, without than taking any strong stances on the issue.
In regard to Alper’s questions, I don’t think Fisher, Rubin, or Olkin had any professional “death wishes”; I’m guessing they were motivated by some combination of political views, irritation at the statistical weaknesses of some anti-smoking arguments, and money. And, hey, these are strong motivations for me too! Not regarding smoking, but on other statistical and policy issues I’ve written about.
2. Regarding the specifics of the case, this news is not surprising. The names David Abrams and Ray Niaura rang a bell. From my post in Feb 2020 on the topic:
I looked up David Abrams, the first author of the letter sent to the journal. He’s a professor of public health at New York University, his academic training is in clinical psychology, and he’s an expert on cigarette use. For example, one of his recent papers is, “How do we determine the impact of e-cigarettes on cigarette smoking cessation or reduction? Review and recommendations for answering the research question with scientific rigor,” and another is “Managing nicotine without smoke to save lives now: Evidence for harm minimization.” A web search brought me to this article, “Don’t Block Smokers From Becoming Smoke-Free by Banning Flavored Vapes,” on a website called Filter, which states, “Our mission is to advocate through journalism for rational and compassionate approaches to drug use, drug policy and human rights.” Filter is owned and operated by The Influence Foundation, which has received support from several organizations, including Juul Labs, Philip Morris International, and Reynolds American, Inc. . . .
So, several of the people involved in this controversy have conflicts. In their letter to the journal, Abrams et al. write, “The signatories write in a personal capacity and declare no competing interests with respect to tobacco or e-cigarette industries.” I assume this implies that Abrams is not directly funded by Juul Labs, Philip Morris International, etc.; he just writes for an organization that has this funding, so it’s not a direct competing interest. But in any case these researchers all have strong pre-existing pro- or anti-vaping commitments.
Hmmm . . . so maybe this was a competing interest! If Abrams and Niaura were asking Juul officials for talking points, allowed company executives to review an academic article before publishing, and attended Juul scientific advisory board meetings . . . it does sound like they were expecting compensation from Juul in some form or another, right? I can’t really say. The linked news article is paywalled so I don’t know what is in these documents that they cite.
In any case, if the researchers really “attended Juul scientific advisory board meetings,” then, yeah, that sounds like a conflict of interest to me. Much more of a conflict than simply publishing an article on a website funded by Juul.
As always, Andrew is being too kind and I was too snarky when I coupled my criticism of Abrams and Niaura with the supposed misdeeds of Gino. Few people will ever have their lives shortened by signing an honesty pledge at the top of a page rather than at the bottom of a page. Nor do I really have a deep knowledge of the term “Death Wish,” so this is what I found:
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https://listen-hard.com/clinical-and-counseling-psychology/death-wish-psychology/
“Freud believed that alongside the life instinct Eros, which drives individuals to seek pleasure and survival, there exists the death drive – Thanatos. This concept suggests that humans also have an innate urge toward self-destruction and aggression.”
“The death wish can manifest in various forms, such as risky behaviors, self-sabotage, or even attraction to dangerous situations. According to Freud, this internal conflict between Eros and Thanatos influences our behaviors, emotions, and relationships.”
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Public utterances defending smoking is as career enhancing as claiming Jews control the weather.** Or, to put it another way, contribute to a statistics blog and you can expect instant, informed and heartfelt disagreement.
**MTG probably increased her popularity with that assertion.
Here’s another defense of vaping and other nicotine delivery methods, just today in the NYT.
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/opinion/smoking-vaping-fda.html?unlocked_article_code=1.xE4.QKyR.pzhTqhpOYdqm&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
I wonder what conflicts the author has.
Dogen:
Just because some people who express a particular view have conflicts of interest, it doesn’t mean that everyone who expresses that view has a conflict.
I don’t think Dogen’s question implied the answer couldn’t be “none”, just that, given the track record discussed above, it was an appropriate question to ask.
Yes, thank you. I looked up the author and she seems very credible to me. I was trying to make a kinda joke/wry remark and it didn’t come across properly.
It’s an interesting topic, and right in line with the long past post where some UCSF researchers were expressing great skepticism of the relative safety of non-tobacco nicotine delivery methods.
My normal biases (priors?) are strongly favorable towards any UCSF researcher but those folks seem to have overreached in this case.
Perhaps it’s not easy to decide whether some situation is a conflict of interest or a conflict of interest-ing interpretations of incidences
It’s pretty clear that the authors failed to report a their financial conflict of interest.
OH2, what Andrew might ask is how good the research and the claims it makes really are if the only way we can assess the results is by knowing the potential conflicts of interest. The conflict of interest only matters when the research results are week – or, more commonly, worthless. No one claims that, because Elon Musk makes money from selling Teslas, he has a “conflict of interest” for claiming a Tesla emits less carbon than an ICE vehicle. What the “conflict of interest” declaration accomplishes is mostly a short-cut for people who lack the competence or initiative to assess the work. And we know that competenece is in short supply across the social sciences.
OH3, this is one of many reasons that most research isn’t suitable for policy until it’s been thoroughly challenged.
OH4, cash is always at the top of Andrew’s list of evils that are “conflicts of interest”, but “belief” never appears there. Which is interesting because the pro-choice / pro-life debate is one of his past favorite issues, yet almost no one on either side of that issue is involved in it for the money. Or what about JD Vance’s favorite Swede? Did she go on her crusade for the money? No. What about Elon with Tesla and SpaceX? Did Elon need money? No. It’s blatantly obvious that belief is a *far* more powerful motivator than money, but no one reports their beliefs as a “conflict of interest.”
Anon:
I think it’s a mistake for you to think that very rich people aren’t motivated by money. Being motivated by money, even after they are rich, is one reason they are very rich. Or consider an analogy: I’ve published several hundred scientific articles. I don’t “need” to publish anymore. But I’m still motivated to do so.
In general I think it’s useful to point out conflicts of interest where they occur. I wrote an award-winning paper once with a coauthor who worked at Novartis. To the extent that you would want to use our paper to judge the quality of some Novartis drug, yeah, I think you should be aware of the conflict. That doesn’t mean that anything we wrote in that paper is false or even biased. Disclosure is important and I don’t think it’s just “mostly a short-cut for people who lack the competence or initiative to assess the work.” If someone wants to make a claim about one car having lower emissions than another, then, yes, I’d like to see this from someone who does not have a financial interest in one of the companies involved.
” The conflict of interest only matters when the research results are week [sic]– or, more commonly, worthless.”
In an ideal world this might be true. But in the real world, it’s not even close. In any research project I’ve ever seen, unless it is a toy problem concocted as a homework project in a Statistics 101 course, there are always many choices to be made about how to proceed and what assumptions to make. This is what Andrew refers to as the garden of forking paths. Moreover, again, beyond the level of a toy problem, reporting the results in a publication, space limitations preclude a complete exposition of all of those choices and assumptions. On top of that, some assumptions may, to the investigator, appear to be so “routine” or such a habitual part of his or her workflow that he or she isn’t even aware of having made a choice, or that alternative ways of proceeding exist. None of these things can be reliably gleaned from a review of research reports. Yet all of them are potentially influenced by conflicts of interest. So knowledge of those conflicts is important even to the sophisticated reader.
Better than reporting conflicts of interest, of course, is avoiding them altogether. And I believe that investigators should be prohibited from researching questions where they have a conflict of interest. Relying on reported conflicts of interest is too reliant on the honesty of the author and the accuracy of the author’s own understanding of what constitutes a potential and actual conflict of interest. An additional problem has been surfaced in this thread in that, at least in one case, the money in question was “laundered” through a foundation, disguising its true origin, and we cannot know whether the investigator was aware of that or not.
Anonymous –
? No. It’s blatantly obvious that belief is a *far* more powerful motivator than money
I’d like to know what metrics and methods you use to reach such a certain conclusion.
That said, I do think the cognitive biases (confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, identity-defensive cognition, etc.) are often overlooked or underestimated in the causal chain that predicts beliefs, stated, or otherwise.
Can money ever motivate without a belief in the value of money? ;)