Are you a low-carbon technology entrepreneur?

Join us on 20th April 2006 at the University of Surrey in Guildfordfor the first in an exciting series of events specifically aimed at Low Carbon technology start-ups.

You will hear from industry experts regarding the issues faced in this sector as well as understanding the business support available to you.

COMMENTS

have time to answer them. Reading University replied that it knew Professor Warburton’s work had been sponsored by the tobacco companies. Indeed, the University itself had received over £300,000 from ARISE, though ‘from the University’s standpoint, the source of funding for ARISE has always been vague’. It revealed that ‘Professor Warburton and the University of Reading were in receipt of BAT research funding between 1995 and 2003’. But at no time had it questioned this funding or sought to oblige Warburton to declare his interests in academic papers. Astonishingly, it suggested that this would amount to ‘censorship’ and ‘restricting academic freedom’. The journal Psychopharmacology told me that it was unaware that Professor Warburton had been taking money from the tobacco companies. ‘It is an author’s responsibility to disclose sources of funding, and widely understood that journals themselves do not expect to police this declaration.’ After a long career untroubled by questions about his interests or his professional ethics, David Warburton retired in 2003. He still lectures at Reading as Emeritus Professor. How much more science is being published in academic journals with undeclared interests like these? How many more media campaigns against ‘over-regulation’, the ‘compensation culture’ or ‘unfounded public fears’ have been secretly funded and steered by corporations? How many more undeclared recipients of corporate money have been appearing on the Today programme, providing free public relations for their sponsors? This case suggests to me that both academia and the media have failed dismally to exercise suffi cient scepticism. Surely there is one obvious question with which every journal and every journalist should begin: ‘Who’s funding you?’

■ Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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