Brewers, Booze and Medicine: Industrial Funding of Alcoholic Liver Disease Research in 1980s Britain

Abstract

Summary This article investigates why Britain’s brewing industry chose to sponsor a particular set of studies on liver disease during the 1980s, expounding on the nature of private-sector funding in clinical research. Through previously unexplored internal records, the article underscores how the drinks industry participated in wider debates on alcohol and public health by seeking the aid of medical expertise. Partly to minimise its own responsibility for the rise of problem drinking, the industry financed studies that looked into factors other than alcohol that contributed to the development of cirrhosis. The identification of the disease’s inborn determinants relating to heredity and sex strengthened the notion that only a minority of drinkers were at risk of developing alcohol-related illnesses, undermining the call for policies that targeted all drinking. Although driven by self-interest, the industry nevertheless supported legitimate lines of inquiry that elucidated the complex, multifactorial causation of cirrhosis.