Can Industry-Funded Research Lead To Solid Scientific Results?

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

August 2, 2012 | 3:08 PM

In light of the University of Texas’ recent failure to disclose a researcher’s ties to the natural gas drilling industry, the New York Times’ Andrew Revkin weighs in on the issue of industry-funded drilling research:

I’ve seen studies of this kind that have robust findings. The “Future of Natural Gas” analysis of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Energy Institute, while undertaken with some industry money and (marginally disclosed) relationships of authors to energy companies, appears to have held up well to independent scrutiny, for instance.
But there are troubling instances in which an undisclosed financial tie has created after-the-fact problems for substantial research projects. This was the case with the report and bundle of related material produced last February by the University of Texas Energy Institute assessing risks from gas drilling using hydraulic fracturing (“fracking” in both environmental and industry shorthand).
The university is assembling a panel to evaluate the report’s findings in the wake of a report from the Public Accountability Initiative that found substantial financial ties between a lead investigator, Prof. Charles G. Groat, and a drilling company.

Last year, StateImpact Pennsylvania examined how difficult it is for researchers to find unbiased funding sources for natural gas-related studies.