If you haven't yet read Fast Company's article about the history of the chemical industry's efforts to resist BPA regulation, you should check it out. It's a long piece, so I just got around to reading it. But it offers great detail on the conflicts of interest and fudged studies that have plagued the industry side of this issue. It's also great at giving you a sense of how carefully studies must be scrutinized for their validity, and why repeatable results are so important in scientific research. Here's just one example from the article:

The largest and most influential industry studies have been conducted by Rochelle Tyl of the Research Triangle Institute, a private lab in North Carolina. Tyl's first BPA study, published in 2002 at a cost that Tyl puts at around $2 million (also funded by the Society of the Plastics Industry), examined three generations of rats and found no adverse effects at low doses. Yet here, too, there are questions of protocol. The study used a rat strain called the CD Sprague-Dawley, which has been shown to be insensitive to synthetic estrogens like BPA. (A Japanese study found that the CD Sprague-Dawley rat can withstand a dose of synthetic estrogen more than 100 times greater than what a female human can tolerate.) As of early 2007, of the 29 studies that have shown no harm due to BPA, 13 have used the CD Sprague-Dawley rat. Nonetheless, when the FDA declared BPA "safe" this fall, it relied almost exclusively on Tyl's work -- a shortcoming that the agency's science board publicly criticized in October.

It's cases like this that are worth keeping in mind whenever you hear about a single, groundbreaking study that poses an emergency for everyone. Sometimes the worrying results of a single study are enough to change our behavior, particularly if it is published in a rigorously peer-reviewed and highly respected journal, but an accumulation of evidence validated by other researchers is what good science really demands.

Read the full story here.