Industry trials can be well conducted, but there are many situations where a lack of independence has had an influenceon the way the study was designed and the results that are released.
When independent experts who are free from conflicts of interest come together in good faith to study an issue, they can have a profound and constructive influenceon government policy.
People, I believe, are far more complex than the "facts" which a study that is already slanted to a specific position ("the influence of working women on the divorce rate" for example) will provide.
The study found that so-called "sociometric" leaders like Physician 184 had more of an influenceon word-of-mouth buzz than the self-reported opinion leaders, perhaps because the latter group tend to be less involved with their peers.
The European mission will instead study the influence of dark energy by looking for subtle distortions in the way galaxies appear as they line up on the sky, and by measuring the patterns in the three dimensional distribution of galaxies through time.