[shadowgovt]

I'm reminded of the Ethyl corporation funding the studies that said lead wasn't very harmful.

... Of course, that's the thing about science. The people doing research are separate from the ones providing the money. And people will put money behind the research that they believe is correct. This does, of course, incentivize some unethical folks to fudge numbers, but in general, the right way to approach this is to separate the funding from the science. See what the science says. Then, if you see an outlier paper and you need to understand why it's so different from the consensus... It might be helpful to see who is funding it to understand.

Going the other way (discounting the science based on who is funding it) is forming theories without data.

[solarkraft]

> people will put money behind the research that they believe is correct

s/they believe is correct/the narrative of which benefits them.

Unfortunately it's hard to separate funding from the science. What can one do? Ban privately funded research? Force funders of a study to fund another attempting to find contrary results/pick it apart?

While I agree that some source of funding doesn't automatically invalidate a study, but anecdotally (and probably empirically), studies surprisingly often agree with the people who fund them.

[hypertele-Xii]

> Force funders of a study to fund another attempting to find contrary results/pick it apart?

That's not a bad idea. The national counter-research unit. Any privately funded research is taxed at some percentage and all proceedings go to debunking that very research!