CONFLICTS OF INTEREST: The incentives of grant funding and career advancement, even the potential for fame, can influence researchers.

A number of recent news articles have brought renewed attention to financial conflicts of interest in medical science. Physicians and medical administrators had financial links to companies that went undeclared to medical journals even when they were writing on topics in which they clearly had monetary interests.

Most agree such lapses damage the medical and scientific community. But our focus on financial conflicts of interest should not lead us to ignore other conflicts that may be equally or even more important. Such biases need not be explicit, like fraud.

“I believe a more worrisome source of research bias derives from the researchers seeking to fund and publish their work, and advance their academic careers,” said Dr. Jeffrey Flier, a former dean of Harvard Medical School who has written on this topic a number of times.

How might grant funding and career advancement — even the potential for fame — be biasing researchers? How might the desire to protect reputations affect the willingness to accept new information that reverses prior findings?

Substantially.