DAVID EGILMAN was incensed when he saw the research paper in Texas Medicine. It suggested that workers at Dow Chemical had “favourable mortality patterns” compared with the general population. This was despite several cases of mesothelioma, an asbestos-related lung cancer, among its 28,000 employees (the usual incidence of mesothelioma is around one or two cases per million). Guess who conducted the study? Dow.

So Egilman, an asbestos expert at Brown University, submitted a critique to the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. It was rejected; Egilman bought two pages of advertising space in the journal and ran the entire rejected manuscript anyway.

This intriguing episode happened two years ago but went unreported. Now the tenacious Egilman has had another crack of the whip. In an article for a rival journal, he denounces the JOEM for alleged pro-corporate bias and blurring the line between editorial and advertising to suit its agenda. It will rightly focus attention on the debate over industry-funded science. After all, had a link between illness and the workplace been established, litigation may have followed.

In this month’s International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, Egilman accuses the JOEM editor, Paul Brandt-Rauf, of “suppressing scientific information with the apparent intent of protecting the interests and profits of the corporate sponsor”. Professor Brandt-Rauf had told Egilman that the manuscript was rejected for publication because it would be of little interest to readers. But if readers were so uninterested, Egilman fumes, then why was Dow allowed editorial space for a rebuttal?

Professor Brandt-Rauf has come out with his fists raised. “I don’t know where he [Egilman] gets this idea that he gets to publish anything he wants in the journal of his choice,” Brandt-Rauf told The Scientist last week. “If that were true, I’d publish all of my pieces in Nature and Science.” If Egilman needed any more fuel for his fury, it came in Brandt-Rauf’s comment that, had he seen the ad before publication, he would have vetoed it.

That, Egilman writes, “is even more troublesome”, because it shows a willingness to censor advertising material that does not toe the editorial line. A commentary accompanying Egilman’s tart review points to associations between the JOEM and Dow, and says that Dow is a significant contributor to Columbia University, which employs Brandt-Rauf. It isn’t meaty conspiracy fodder, but it turns out that an organisation affiliated to JOEM once gave Dow a “corporate health achievement award”. Still, the acrimonious tussle provides an insight into the practice and dissemination of corporate science.

• THE MOST famous dinosaur of all, Tyrannosaurus rex, may have been a cannibal. The American fossil hunter Mike Triebold recently uncovered the fossil of a juvenile T. rex scored with the fang marks of an adult tyrannosaurus. Triebold declares, in National Geographic, this to be “the first direct evidence of rex-on-rex violence”.

  In addition, the Montana site contained teeth from Nanotyrannus, a smaller, closely related species. Triebold speculates that the youngster may have been slaughtered and partially eaten by the older T. rex, with the so-called Nanos finishing the scraps. But there are alternatives — a pack of Nanos may have committed the murderous deed, with the older T. rex finishing the remains. Or the rex-on-rex fatal fang fight may have been territorial rather than cannibalistic. Still, it will add to the fledgeling debate about whether dinosaurs were Cretaceous cannibals. The gruesome practice is, of course, well documented in several mammalian species, including humans.

• I’M A REAL carb lover. That’s why the Atkins diet whirlwind left me cold (in any case, I don’t do diets, just pudding avoidance). But now even more research testifies to the benefits of a relatively high-protein, low-carb diet. Donald Layman, from the University of Illinois, reports in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition that such diets promote weight loss while maintaining blood glucose level by stimulating the production of leucine, a fat-burning chemical. A high-protein breakfast is particularly recommended. It is, truly, time to go to work on an egg.

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