Abstract
Two genres of outcry in the US concerning the current state of science in public life need to be connected. One is politicization of science in regulatory and research agencies of the federal government; the other is commercialization of academic research. Since the 1990s, commercially funded think tanks have been the primary source for politically charged science policy. But continuing commercialization of academic research threatens to make universities and federal research institutions look similarly political. This development undermines public trust in science, which presents a fundamental challenge for democratic societies. Like the free press and the independent judiciary, trustworthy knowledge is fundamental to the responsible action of informed citizens and their legislators. Its preservation, however, cannot lie in any attempt to recover a strong divide between pure/academic and applied/industrial research. Commercialization is inevitable. To nevertheless mitigate the erosion of public trust, new institutions of evaluative oversight will be required, whether as academic/industrial collaborations or as federal agencies.
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Notes
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The papers collected in Grandin et al. (2004) provide a thorough critique of the pure-to-applied and university-to-industry model, or the “linear model.”
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Forman worries that the cultural primacy of technology is justifying the view that ends justify means, as opposed to the principle long established in democratic societies that ends must be judged in terms of the means for accomplishing them. Current political developments countenance the worry, as in the Bush administration’s arguments for torture, but I am skeptical that technology is the culprit.
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For example, the University of California has drafted a Health Care Vendor Relations Policy, emanating from the Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President and dated 25 January 2008, that sets minimum standards for its ten campuses. Supported by a bibliography of six articles in respected medical journals, the Univeristy recognizes that “A growing body of research has consistently demonstrated that nominal gifts from vendors [e.g., drug makers], heretofore thought to be innocuous, unconsciously affect provider [physicians’] behavior,” and is attempting to find a compromise, prohibiting obvious abuses such as gifts to individuals while allowing donations that support its mission. Allowed exceptions include educational donations, competitive prizes, research donations, and “honoraria for a specific service rendered” (e.g., delivering a speech, which can be a large exception). Research contracts, consulting fees, royalties, and stock ownership are not controlled, except in the requirement of disclosure.
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http://www.gene.com/gene/about/management/exec/levinson.jsp. Princeton, Spring 2006, 6.
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http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/32982. Public Draft of the Declaration of the Second International Meeting on Synthetic Biology.
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See the Union of Concerned Scientists at http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/restoring/scientific-advice.html. The Federation of American Scientists has launched a new archive of OTA documents at http://fas.org/ota/, which also contains a widely distributed video interview with Rush Holt, http://fas.org/ota/2008/07/23/watch-rush-holt-talk-about-ota/. Princeton University is host to an archive containing all formally issues reports of the OTA and other documents at http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/.
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Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper appeared in Social Research, 73 (2006), 1253–1272. For their very helpful suggestions I thank organizer Tiago Saraiva and commentators Manuel Villaverde Cabral and João Caraça at an HoST Lecture at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon; the participants in the Graduiertenkolleg of the Institut für Wissenschafts- und Technikforschung at the University of Bielefeld; and Elaine Wise, Lorraine Daston, Sally Gibbons, Theodore Porter, Suman Seth, and Otto Sibum.
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Wise, M.N. (2011). Thoughts on Politicization of Science Through Commercialization. In: Carrier, M., Nordmann, A. (eds) Science in the Context of Application. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 274. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9051-5_17
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