Oil industry funding study to contradict cancer claims

[Rose Siding]

Concerned that research linking benzene to cancer could lead to expensive and strict controls on the petroleum industry, five major oil companies are funding a multimillion-dollar study to counter the findings, documents obtained by the Houston Chronicle show.

The study, launched in 2001 in Shanghai, China, with as much as $27 million from BP, ChevronTexaco, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil and Shell Chemical, will analyze benzene's effects on the blood and bone marrow, and its ability to cause cancer in workers.
...
But in depositions, proposals to oil companies and other documents collected by a Houston law firm in unrelated lawsuits and provided to the Chronicle, the results of the study already have been predicted.
...
Jonathan Ward, a toxicologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston who studies the effects of another industrial chemical, 1,3-butadiene, on workers' genes, said some parts of the study appeared scientifically inappropriate.

It seems to me that "they are selling this study to whoever is going to pay for it, and are promising a result in advance," Ward said.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/3159505

[wellst0nev0ter]

1. Hey, We Always Need To Balance Out Real Science, Right?

Because if there is absolute certitude, the media won't know what to do with itself.

[Bridget Burke]

2. One crap study won't make people who live on the upper Gulf Coast...

stop calling it "The Cancer Belt".