How did the United States get this so wrong for so long? It’s the same story of disputed science and delayed regulation you could tell about asbestos,15 or tobacco,16 or many other products that slowly kill us. The government did, in the 1920s, call for continued research. And for the next four decades, those studies were conducted by scientists funded by the Ethyl Corporation and General Motors.17 It was only in the 1960s that American universities developed policies on conflicts of interest in research.
