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Last year Pierre Ayotte of the University of Laval published another one of those ”uh-oh” scientific studies that send hot sparks up the spines and down through the bowels of the chemical industry.

Looking at immune cells taken from newborns living on the North Shore of the St. Lawrence River, Prof. Ayotte and his colleagues found that the more chemical-laced seafood a mother ate, the worse her baby's immune system seemed to function.

The chemicals in question were forms of mercury and those dread organochlorines – think the despised PCBs – that continue to frighten all and sundry. This month, the same paper was publicly drawn attention to by the Center for Science In the Public Interest (CSIPI), a large and influential Washington, D.C.-based nutrition and health advocacy organization that proudly describes its goals as: ”To provide useful, objective information to the public and policy makers and to conduct research on food, alcohol, health, the environment, and other issues related to science and technology” and ”to ensure that science and technology are used for the public good and to encourage scientists to engage in public-interest activities.”

Now the innocent among you might have assumed that Prof. Ayotte's research, part of a suite of investigations he has done over more than a decade period searching for links between chemicals in the environment and human disease – particularly in native populations – would have merited five gold stars and a hand-written hurrah from CSIPI.

But no.

In a study on conflicts of interest in leading medical and scientific journals conducted by Merrill Goozner, director CSIPI's Integrity In Science Project, and presented at an international conference on scientific integrity in Washington earlier this month, Prof. Ayotte was singled out as a moral bad guy.

He was up there with loyalty-divided scientists who wrote articles touting the cancer-fighting qualities of a drug they developed three weeks before taking out a patent on it and two doctors who wrote about the formation of plaque in the arteries without mentioning consulting relationships with 20 companies in the heart-disease field.

Prof. Ayotte's crimes of integrity were twofold. He acknowledged in the aforementioned paper that the funding for the baby immune system study came from the Canadian Network of Toxicology Centres. But he did not break this down to indicate that whereas 95 per cent of the CNTC's revenues were from government sources, 5 per cent of its more than $2-million budget came from the Canadian Chemical Producers Association. The exact nature of this ”contribution” I will discuss a little later.

Worse by far, there was no mention in the 2003 paper that previous papers on which Prof. Ayotte's name had appeared received funding from the chemical producers and from the Canadian Chlorine Co-ordinating Committee, an industry organization.

In toto this meant, the CSIPI study said, that Prof. Ayotte ”stood to gain financially from the publication of the article” and was in a further potential conflict of interest because ”the results could effect [Prof. Ayotte's] funding from those sources in the future.”

Now the simple-minded among you may be more than a tad startled by the fact that chemical organizations of Canada are so cleverly demonic that they have decided to undermine the perceived objectivity of this country's scientists by giving them money to conduct research that ends up detailing all the ugly things discarded chemicals can and are doing to humans.

But then, to believe any of CSIPI's charges you had to ignore the e-mail that Prof. Ayotte had sent them in response to preliminary questions about his funding.

First, Prof. Ayotte told CSIPI that he hadn't realized that the Canadian Chemical Producers Association gave anything to the alliance of toxicology centres. You can argue that a scientist receiving money is supposed to know where the money comes from so as to avoid any real or perceived conflicts of interest. But a call to the toxicology centres head office revealed that industry donation is made into a ”blind trust.” Thus, there are no strings attached to the relatively itsy bit of money the companies contribute and all granting decisions are made by an independent group of scientists.

If this constitutes a conflict of interest, it is beyond picayune if you ask me.

Second, Prof. Ayotte explained in his e-mail that he himself hadn't received any – let me repeat – any industry money in the earlier articles. Rather it was all a grant to a graduate student of paper's principal investigator, Ross Norstrom, then of Carleton University and the Canadian Wildlife Service.

”I never received a penny,” Professor Ayotte announces defiantly to me over the phone and Prof. Norstrom confirms this. What was provided in the name of that great scientific good – collaboration – was some blood samples for the Carleton group. Prof. Ayotte was acknowledged as an author in that honorific way that scientists sometimes do.

And further to the ”isn't this ironic” quality that adheres to CSIPI's strange critique, these earlier studies found PCB's and their chemical kin caused thyroid hormonal dysfunctions in newborns whose mothers dined principally on seafood.

So why the public pillorying? In terms of declaring conflicts of interest – particularly in terms of previous moneys you got from industry organizations – Mr. Goozner refuses to admit the case looks quite dodgy.

”You can't be a little bit pregnant” and ”there was a pattern there” and ”in order to keep the money flowing potentially you are doing subtle things,” he tells me about the kind of conflicted state of mind a scientist can get into.

”The study was funded by the industry. … I don't know what could be clearer,” he continues.

Given all I have written above, I don't know what could be less clear and more unfair.

To my mind what we are seeing in l'affaire Ayotte is a sort of polluted guilt by association. If someone whom Mr. Ayotte tangentially worked with got funding from an industry organization, then he got that funding. If industry gave a no-strings-attached money to an organization that later gave him a grant, then he must have been influenced by the source of the money. In politics, we would call this McCarthyism; in science we may be taken to calling it Gooznerism.

The conflict of interest here is a phantom. But the blot on the reputation of a scientist who is universally respected by his peers – not just for the quality of his work but for its integrity – is real.

Shame on you, CSIPI! And shame on you, Merrill Goozner!