Why hasn the National Cancer Institute (NCI) warned the public of these documented cancer risks?
There may be multiple ethical, socioeconomic, political and cultural reasons why this information has not been made readily available to the general public. In February of 2005, Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which encompasses the NCI, banned all staff scientists from taking drug-company fees because he wanted “the NIH to be a source of health information that could be trusted.”7 Government scientists had moonlighting jobs and were receiving large fees and stock options from pharmaceutical companies, which is clearly an unethical conflict of interest. More alarmingly, in 2005 the prestigious British journal Nature published a study which showed 15.5% of scientists with NIH grants anonymously admitted to “changing the design, methodology, or results of a study in response to pressure from a funding source,” which is a form of scientific misconduct.
