The group issued a 130-page report that criticized Graham’s record on the environment and other causes and pointed to the corporate financial support of HCRA as evidence of ties with big business.

The report cited cases in which Graham’s research found results favorable to the center’s backers.

Democrats opposing Graham’s confirmation shared many of Public Citizens’ concerns during Senate floor debate. Durbin called the corporate sponsors of HCRA “a veritable list of who’s who of industrial sponsors.”

“These corporate clients came to Professor Graham not to find ways to increase regulation on their businesses, but just for the opposite, so that he can provide through his center a scientific basis for resisting government regulation in the areas of public health and the environment,” Durbin said.

Durbin and others said Graham held a bias against regulation of any sort.

Supporters of Graham maintained that criticism of HCRA has been already adequately addressed, and that opposition was largely partisan in nature.

HCRA’s Director of Risk Communications David Ropeik said that previous criticism of HCRA’s objectivity led to an intensive self-examination, but that in the end SPH determined that the center was acting properly.

“All of this examination by us and the school lead to a very comfortable recognition that we’ve done nothing wrong,” Ropeik said. “We found out that we had tighter conflict of interest rules and more oversight than most other centers at Harvard,” he said.