Bots against beef?

We Texans love our beef, and we don’t like it when someone suggests we shouldn’t. Oprah did so on national television and a disgruntled cattle industry hauled her into a six-week trial in Amarillo, Texas, in 1998. Now, Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp has his own beef over beef, this one with Harvard University researchers, who accuse A&M researchers of conducting a biased, pro-beef study published last fall in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

We aren’t going to pick sides on the merits of the research or the criticism. But we will take issue with the way this dispute has played out publicly and the disservice it does to scientific credibility.

Over the years, most of us have read headlines about beef research and probably have come to the conclusion that findings often are remarkably free ranging. Beef consumption is either good or bad for your health, depending on the parameters of the study and, the bane of academic research, ideological predispositions and the impact of funding support on outcomes.

This latest controversy began when Harvard researchers pointedly accused one of the study’s 19 authors, a Texas A&M researcher, of being in the pocket of the beef industry and of downplaying the risks of beef consumption. The author, they say, hadn’t disclosed that he had received funding for other research partly backed by the beef industry.

Predictably, A&M didn’t take this attack lightly. Sharp wants Harvard University President Lawrence Bacow to investigate the Harvard faculty members for mischaracterizing scientific research and besmirching A&M’s academic reputation.

Annals Editor-in-Chief Christine Laine has said her inbox was hit with 2,000 emails with messages so alike and scathing in tone that she believed them to have been generated by a bot.

The True Health Initiative denies a bot attack and stands by its concern that the study is misleading. But this clash is neither a shining example of classic peer review, nor does it provide useful guidance to nutritionists, doctors and consumers trying to make informed dietary choices. Scientific debate must be better than this.