It’s an obvious conflict of interest. To be making public judgments about whether a lab could be responsible when you are partly responsible for what that lab has done is precisely the definition of conflict of interest.

It’s called self-policing elsewhere, and anybody would see the conflict of interest immediately at FAANG, for example. Was FB causing teen depression? Researcher says no. (Then it turns out the researcher had done consulting work for FB or had been in contact with FB, advocating that they use the timeline feed to run experiments on unsuspecting teens…