Conflicting interests: the evolution of an issue.

The systematic funding of University research has brought into relief a question of conflicting interests. The potential in funded research for conflict and the damaging effects that conflicting interests might have on civil society had been first noted by Eisenhower in the context of State-funded research. Since the 1980s, there has been greater concern with the corrosive effects of private or corporate funding on research. Initial efforts to manage the problems have focused on authorship declarations, but recent controversies with the SSRIs suggest the only way to manage the problem is by placing all clinical trial data in the public domain.