I'M PAYING FOR THAT MICROSCOPE! (via Tom Corcoran):

The Dawn of McScience: a review of Science in the Private Interest: Has the Lure of Profits Corrupted Biomedical Research? by Sheldon Krimsky (Richard Horton, March 11, 2004, NY Review of Books)

In Science in the Private Interest, a strongly argued polemic against the commercial conditions in which scientific research currently operates, he shows how universities have become little more than instruments of wealth. This shift in the mission of academia, Krimsky claims, works against the public interest. Universities have sacrificed their larger social responsibilities to accommodate a new purpose—the privatization of know- ledge—by engaging in multimillion-dollar contracts with industries that demand the rights to negotiate licenses from any subsequent discovery (as Novartis did, Krimsky reports, in a $25 million deal with the University of California at Berkeley). Science has long been ripe for industrial colonization. The traditional norms of disinterested inquiry and free expression of opinion have been given up in order to harvest new and much-needed revenues. When the well-known physician David Healy raised concerns about the risks of suicide among those taking one type of antidepressant, his new appointment as clinical director of the University of Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health was immediately revoked. Universities have reinvented themselves as corporations. Scientists are coming to accept, and in many cases enjoy, their enhanced status as entrepreneurs. But these subtle yet insidious changes to the rules of engagement between science and commerce are causing, in Krimsky's view, incalculable injury to society, as well as to science.

This escalating corrosion of values derives from a sharp change in the political climate during the 1970s. University administrators came to see their faculties as an undervalued resource. To counter what was seen as a culture of financial passivity, the Patent and Trademark Amendments (Bayh-Dole) Act of 1980 enabled universities to claim entitlement to inventions made with the support of federal funds. Suddenly university deans found themselves sitting on a mountain of unrealized income. Scientists took to their new commercial calling with relish. Surveys reveal that a high proportion of researchers have ties to the industries whose products they are investigating. Many have argued and some no doubt believe that money could never influence their scientific independence. But Krimsky makes a telling comparison of journalists and public officials, two groups for whom monetary conflicts of interest, now endemic in science, are anathema to their professional ethics. Instead, and this is surely a remarkable double standard, scientists absolve themselves from the dangers of often deep financial conflicts (such as company directorships, equity ownership, research grants, honoraria, and travel costs) by the simple means of disclosure. Reporting a payment, a gift, or other interest has become a panacea, especially in medical journals, allowing scientists to wash their hands of criticism.

This situation cannot be justified. Krimsky writes that "the relationship between conflicts of interest and bias has been downplayed within the scientific community to protect the entrepreneurial ethos in academia." But the damage inflicted by the influence of profit on the purpose of science has spread far beyond the university. The federal advisory committees that dispense funds now give private interests priority over public ones. If committee members receive substantial payments from industries, this should in principle disqualify them from decisions affecting those industries. In the case of vaccine policy, for example, Krimsky quotes a 1999 US House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform, which concluded that conflict of interest rules on FDA and CDC advisory committees had "been weak, enforcement has been lax, and committee members with substantial ties to pharmaceutical companies have been given waivers to participate in committee proceedings."

Even scientific journals, supposedly the neutral arbiters of quality by virtue of their much-vaunted process of critical peer review, are owned by publishers and scientific societies that derive and demand huge earnings from advertising by drug companies and from the sale of commercially valuable content. The pressure on editors to adopt positions that favor these industries is yet another example of the bias that has infiltrated academic exchange. As editor of The Lancet I have attended medical conferences at which I have been urged to publish more favorable views of the pharmaceutical industry. For Krimsky, "the idea that public risk (that is, publicly supported research) should be turned into private wealth is a perversion of the capitalist ethic."

The notion of money corrupting the previously pure profession or the neutral pursuit of knowledge is rather precious.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 4, 2004 3:49 PM