In a perfect world, scientific experts would be free from the entanglements of everyday life, such as job opportunities, investments and other financial arrangements. That world doesn’t exist, so the next best option is disclosure.

This point was driven home upon the recent announcement of new guidelines for cholesterol maintenance. Most of the heart disease experts behind the new American Heart Association guidelines have made money from cholesterol-lowering drugs. Because this was disclosed after the fact, it heightened suspicions that the experts were biased.

The solution might seem simple: Don’t involve experts with such conflicts of interest. Problem is, so few of them exist. The reality is that many of the best scientists have financial stakes in medical companies, receive speaking fees and honoraria, and are funded by research grants.

For a long time, the New England Journal of Medicine had strict conflict rules for authors of articles in its prestigious journal, but it found that it violated those rules 19 times between 1998 and 2000. The Journal of the American Medical Association and other publications have acknowledged using authors with conflicts, too.

But what NEJM found was that in banning authors with connections to drug companies, it couldn’t produce articles about new-drug research. So, like other publications, it eased the restrictions, allowing authors with no “significant” financial stake to contribute, but potential conflicts of interest are disclosed.

The key is disclosure, and if the American Heart Association had practiced such transparency, it wouldn’t find itself in its current public relations predicament. Disclosure is a neutral act that allows consumers to weigh whether the potential conflict matters to them. Experts shouldn’t be insulted, nor should their findings be summarily dismissed. The problem with after-the-fact disclosure is that it looks like conflicts are being hidden, and that only serves to raise suspicions.

Some in the medical community still don’t quite understand this. The Center for Science in the Public Interest recently released a study of four medical journals that found important conflicts of interest in 24 of the 164 studies reviewed.

A positive development is the call for a national or international registry that would house the results of all clinical drug trials, whether successful or not. One criticism of drug companies is that they only publish successful research and keep the possible ill-effects from their products from the public. The American Medical Association and the World Health Organization have endorsed such an effort, saying consumers would benefit from transparency.

Drug companies have produced remarkable medications that make our lives better, but they also have become a huge business with vast investments to protect. The best way to separate business from science in the real world is full disclosure.