The Lacuna Project

lacuna (n.) a gap in a record where something should be

Independent research. Not affiliated with any government, agency, or company.

University

University of California, San Francisco

Findings that rest on exhibits naming this entity

  • AGR-2.1: On 13 July 1965 the Sugar Research Foundation’s executive committee approved Project 226, a literature review of carbohydrates and cholesterol metabolism, and the foundation paid the Harvard authors D. Mark Hegsted and Robert McGandy $6,500 for it.
  • AGR-2.2: According to Kearns et al. (2016), the 1967 New England Journal of Medicine review by McGandy, Hegsted and Stare disclosed other funding of the authors' experimental research and did not mention the Sugar Research Foundation's funding or participation.
  • AGR-2.3: The Sugar Research Foundation’s research director, John Hickson, told Hegsted on 30 July 1965 that he would be disappointed if the sucrose aspect were “drowned out in a cascade of review and general interpretation,” and on 2 November 1966 that the draft was “quite what we had in mind.”
  • AGR-2.4: Kearns, Schmidt and Glantz state that there is no direct evidence that the sugar industry wrote or changed the manuscript of the 1967 review and that the evidence the industry shaped its conclusions is circumstantial.
  • AGR-2.8: Kearns, Glantz and Schmidt reported in 2015 that 78 percent of the sugar industry’s submission was incorporated into the National Institute of Dental Research’s call for research applications for the National Caries Program, a program on tooth decay.
  • AGR-2.15: The documents do not establish whether the Sugar Research Foundation's funding changed the conclusions of the 1967 review.

Exhibits naming this entity

  • Exhibit 584 12 September 2016 (online); 1 November 2016 (print). Kearns CE, Schmidt LA, Glantz SA; JAMA Internal Medicine 176(11):1680-1685: Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents
  • Exhibit 596 10 March 2015. Kearns CE, Glantz SA, Schmidt LA; PLoS Medicine 12(3):e1001798: Sugar industry influence on the scientific agenda of the National Institute of Dental Research's 1971 National Caries Program: a historical analysis of internal documents