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June 2, 2025 - Epoch Times
23:17
How Science Is Co-Opted by Big Gov and Big Pharma: Dr. Lynn Fynn
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Oftentimes, the scientific method, the process, gets reversed.
They look at the conclusion that is agreeable or preferred, and then they start working backwards.
How can we prove this conclusion?
Dr. Lynn Finn is a clinical research scientist and a retired infectious disease specialist.
We sat down to discuss issues she sees plaguing medical research.
From the misallocation of funds to problematic peer review processes to major conflicts of interest.
When a pharmaceutical company gets to pour money into a program, the curriculum is going to reflect what they want it to reflect to make it a profitable transaction for them.
It's a return on investment.
What practical steps are needed to restore public trust in science and medicine?
Where there's transparency, there's trust.
It's really that simple.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellek.
Lynn Finn, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thank you so much, Jan.
Thanks for having me.
So, what is the big issue with clinical scientific research today?
That's a really good question.
First of all, understand that scientific publications are kind of the backbone.
of decision-making in medicine and science as a whole.
When you hear things like evidence-based medicine, it started out with good intentions, but it took a left turn.
The journals, going through a peer review process, have become the basis of what they do now, which is protocols, flowcharts, and guidances.
Tools that are used for clinicians basically draw upon the integrity of those publications.
So when the publications themselves and the research itself becomes compromised, your foundation is quite shaky.
When you have a shaky foundation, what happens?
Your whole building is based on a shaky foundation.
It falls.
And I think we're all experiencing that to some degree presently.
With the advent of the Bayh-Dole Act, with incentives to universities to pump out publications, with the government on one end and pharma on the other end basically bringing in the funds to come up with a certain conclusion or idea.
Pharma comes in and co-ops that, then the taxpayer gets left out of the equation altogether.
For the longest time, the NIAID, one person had quite a lot of control on where that money went.
And with that, the taxpayer funds would make advances that could lead to a commercialized product.
To a patent, but reap none of the rewards of that.
And pharma would co-opt it, and they would reap all the rewards along with the university.
So there are so many things at play and agencies with foundations attached to them where pharma money would come in that, you know, when looking at these scientific publications as the gold standard for how to base an opinion, You have to also understand that so much of it now is conflicted.
There are conflicts of interest on every level.
So then you start to wonder, how much of this Because the peer review process has changed dramatically throughout the years.
You've painted a very broad picture here.
Let's break this down a little bit.
First of all, the legislation that you discussed.
The Bayh-Dole Act basically gave the universities the right to participate in the financial rewards of Say, a patent granted to that university.
Years ago, when I was in undergrad, I worked in a lab, and I made a new discovery, and they gave me a dollar for it, because that's how they did things back then.
They gave you a dollar, okay, and sign this, and it now belongs to the university.
They're not going to, you know, That isn't done anymore.
Now they take part in the funds that are received from leasing the patent or using the patent.
And if that product goes to commercialization, they take part in some of the profits.
The Bayh-Dole Act allowed that to happen.
And in doing so, it also allowed for mountains of publications and scientific research to be published that may not be as robust or have the integrity that we all would want.
Explain to me why this legislation would cause that to happen.
For money.
And it's a numbers game.
The more you put out there, the more you publish, the more chances that you're going to reach a commercialized product or an idea or have pharma come in and co-opt it with you.
By co-opt it, do you mean buy it?
They buy it.
They co-license it.
There are multiple ways that a pharmaceutical company can get involved in the discovery of a product.
Co-license it with you where they work out a deal, where they get royalties, or they pay an upfront price to be able to get it on the back end, or a percentage of return goes to them.
They get to put their labeling on it or whatever.
Or they could buy it outright and develop the rest of it on their own.
Dr. Finn, just one quick sec.
We're going to take a break, and folks, we'll be right back.
And we're back with clinical research scientist Dr. Linfin.
I mean, some people would say this is, you know, the industry supporting academia, right?
I mean, probably that is what a lot of people say, right?
It very much is.
It very much is on both the undergrad and applied science level all the way through medical schools.
But what I mean is they would say that as a good thing.
I find any time you incentivize something, you're creating a bias.
And when you create a bias, there's an element of truth that's removed from the equation.
And when a pharmaceutical company gets to pour money into a program, the curriculum is going to reflect what they want it to reflect to make it a profitable transaction for them.
It's a return on investment.
Say a university is working on a study, and they come out with a very interesting point.
And then they further develop it.
This is all in taxpayer dollars.
And they file a patent.
Patent's granted.
It hits the radar of industry.
And industry contacts them and says, you have this patent.
We'd like to further develop it.
And they start pouring money into more research for that university and start shaping The conclusions to be made.
And by that, I mean, okay, they say, let's start looking for a specific endpoint here.
The endpoint may or may not be relevant to what they're trying to treat, but it doesn't matter because they can make it a marketable product.
And in doing so, they start negotiating.
You know, patent rights, they start negotiating return on investment if they commercialize the product.
They may put more money in there to take it through the FDA process and take it from there since the university wouldn't do that.
And they actually become partners in the deal.
Then you have the conflict of a big pharmaceutical company paying into a government agency.
And getting more of a green light than, say, a small boutique group would or a small group of innovators, you have the name behind you to push it through.
A good example would be an Alzheimer's drug that was approved.
And actually, I looked at all of the data, and it did not show benefit whatsoever.
But it was approved, and it was approved mainly because the behemoth behind it was the one pushing it through, not the scientists at the university.
And they ended up taking it off the market because they couldn't show post-marketing benefit and only adverse events.
But these sorts of things happen regularly.
Our government is another component of that because So what a lot of people don't know is the revenue with the mRNA vaccines for COVID is split in a way that 40% of it goes to the NIH.
Now, does the taxpayer get any of that?
No.
The NIH does.
The other 60% goes to Moderna so they can develop another.
But it's almost like what started off as maybe a good idea has introduced so much conflict that biases enter in a stepwise manner along the way to your finished product.
It's a bit of a complex system, actually.
It is very complex.
For me to understand.
But basically, just the fact that you know money's coming in from someone with deep pockets.
Who's looking for a particular outcome, right?
It makes you much more predisposed to find that outcome, even if the evidence is not very strong, basically.
You're brilliant, but yes, that's exactly it.
It's important, and even if you're not doing it consciously, I suppose, right?
You may not be doing it consciously.
But the bias enters the picture when deep pockets are behind it and they have a vested interest in a specific outcome.
And over the last 40 years, the ones holding the purse strings in our government agencies have made it clear that there could be deep pockets from the government if you come up with an outcome that fits the puzzle.
And therein lies the issue with bias from the scientists, from the research group, or whatever.
And oftentimes, what used to be the scientific method, the process, gets reversed.
They look at the conclusion that is agreeable or preferred, and then they start working backwards.
How can we prove this conclusion?
I mean, statistics you can prove with anything.
Statistics are a very interesting thing because you can use statistics to prove that saline cures cancer.
You can use statistics in any way, shape, or form.
You can use study design to do the same thing.
You know, I was just about to say that because in my underground work, one of the things I loved to do was experimental design as a budding biologist.
And I discovered very quickly that based on the design, I could favor a particular I mean, of course, in certain situations, that's impossible.
And there's these dramatic outcomes, right?
But a lot of the time you could do that.
And I found that actually, frankly, really disturbing.
Because you'd have to assume the best absolute faith of the researcher, truly looking impartially.
And another variable to throw in, a monkey wrench to throw in this whole thing, add ego to it.
So when you have a head of a lab or a head of a research group that's hobnobbing with big pharma and a lot of money, then a new bias enters the picture.
I'm going to make my name.
I'm going to put this university on the map, or I'm going to put my research team on the map, and this is going to be a famous publication that's going to be cited everywhere.
I mean, let's face it.
With intelligent people, there's huge ego.
And that's another monkey wrench.
So, I mean, really, this is almost like an intractable problem that you're painting, or at least I'd love to hear what you think you saw of it.
But basically you're saying if there's money coming from industry or money coming from government or money coming from foundations or wherever that has a particular interest, you know, whatever that is, that influences the outcome dramatically.
I think it does.
So what do we do?
There are several ways to approach this.
If everything that went into the FDA was blinded, just think about it.
You mean if every product that's coming out of a pharma company was, what does blinded mean?
That means the data is uploaded in the system and the IND, which is the Investigational New Drug Application.
If all of that was blinded as to what company And the data is uploaded, just the data, and it has to be looked at objectively by the team.
It could change a lot of things.
It could change the speed of an approval.
It could change the approval itself.
It could take something that really has promise from a nobody and bring it to the forefront.
To me, that's pure innovation.
That's unbiased innovation.
There's no name behind it.
You don't know whether there are billions of dollars behind it or if it's a ragtag group of five scientists that left pharma and formed their own group.
You know nothing about it.
You have an electronic file with all of the data there, and you have no idea where it came from, but it's following the regulatory process.
And the review period and the review process is such that it's objective and you're just looking at the data and you're just giving guidelines based on that.
That could solve a lot of issues.
But you say that data can be corrupted as well.
Okay, well, it can be.
And we learned in the last few years that papers are starting to get retracted because the data That isn't necessarily done when small groups upload data to the IND because usually they're done at a CRO, which is an approved place of study.
It's not a university setting.
it's a CRO, it's a commercial, say phase one unit or phase two unit where their job There is some sort of check and balance to make sure that this is real and done properly.
Well, say on the university level they published a paper that was like the beginning of a commercialized product because it came up with a conclusion that is quite interesting and something to look at.
Something as a bioactive property that can help with a potential disease, for example.
Say that happens, and they want to publish it.
In the past, it would go through a peer review process.
And that peer review process would have all data, all supplemental data, the entire methodology.
And the whole point of peer review would be, I can take this paper and I can go And they can get a group together on the bench, they can do the study, they get the same answers.
The reproducibility of science is a form of proof.
That ended because they felt that that peer review process was not efficient.
It took too much time.
It was not efficient.
They needed more product to publish.
So it became more of what I call pal review.
When you centralize science, you can corrupt science.
When you centralize the economy, you can corrupt the economy.
Any time you turn it into a behemoth that is centralized and Just like a certain group at the NIH decided where all of the tax money went for grants, when a certain group decides what can be published and what cannot be published, at what point does it become PAL review instead of peer review?
Are they looking into the study?
Are they on the bench trying to reproduce part of it?
Are they doing anything, checks and balances or quality control-wise, to say this is...
They're not.
They're saying, oh, that's Professor so-and-so.
He does great work.
The whole idea of review is review, right?
Exactly.
And it's actually been weaponized to a point because now you have groups that may be funded by, who knows, a government or a company, but you have groups that will gang up on a previous publication.
Because of an inconvenient conclusion and find ways to have it retracted.
I've seen it happen to several colleagues of mine that had wonderful studies, some even observational studies, which aren't making claims.
They're a stepping stone to look into something further.
But it was such an inconvenient conclusion that these inorganic groups Come together and start attacking the journal to have it retracted.
And I've seen a couple of attempts of retracting good papers for no reason.
And that pattern kind of tipped me off as to what the motivation was for it.
And I have my own opinions that are anecdotal or not proven.
Are they manipulating the stock price?
Is this some sort of gaming the finances?
Or are they trying to remove inconvenient conclusions from the world's databases where AI would draw from so it's not even mentioned?
There are a lot of great innovations out there that are exciting, but in the wrong hands, they're not.
And we need these checks and balances.
We need blinded submissions.
Like in law, liberty, justice is supposed to be blind.
Well, that needs to happen in science.
And we have to come up with ways to have this done, starting with not having a single entity decide where all the taxpayer dollars for innovation goes.
That is a problem, and it happened for almost 45 years.
That can never happen again.
There has to be panels.
There has to be a more even distribution of deciding where this money goes and what it's going for.
You're saying it should be like a congressional hearing.
You should be able to wander in and listen.
I think so.
I think where this much of our tax dollar goes, we should be able to hear.
Dr. Penn, thank you for this conversation.
Any final thoughts as we finish up?
Final thoughts.
Not all is lost.
I hope people realize that.
A few tweaks and a few mitigating factors enter the picture, and we can turn this around.
We can make health and science a real thing.
We can clean up our food supply, make more efficient and efficient.
We could open up preventative medicine, which is what we haven't spoke about for a long time.
I mean, it was obvious that vitamin D helped.
Why did we quell it?
Why did we not say anything about it as a public agency?
Why did we not rally behind easy, easy fixes that could have prevented quite a lot of loss?
If we start opening our minds, and I'm very hopeful with the new administration, and if we start doing things ethically, morally, and correctly, we can turn this around.
And I think that's what needs to happen.
Well, Dr. Lynn Finn, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thank you so much, Jan.
I appreciate it.
Thank you all for joining Dr. Lynn Finn and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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