Abstract
The tendency is strong to take the notion of “conflict of interests” for granted as if it had an invariant meaning and an ethical content independent of the historical context. It is doubtful however, from an historical and sociological point of view, that many of the cases now considered as instances of “conflicts of interests” would also have been conceived and perceived as such in, say, the 1930s. The idea of a “conflict of interests” presupposes that there are indeed interests in conflict. Conversely, as long as there is a consensus among the different groups involved, they will not conceive and even less denounce a given practice as being an instance of a “conflict of interests”. In this article we will show that the content of the discussions over conflicts of interests has changed over time in close relation with the transformations of the research system. In other words: there are social conditions for the emergence of “conflicts of interests”. The changing meaning of the notion is assessed by analyzing the presence of the expression “conflicts of interests” in the magazine Science over the past century. Three different meanings emerge and their content has evolved in close link with the changing structure of the relations between the scientific community first with the State and then with industry. It moved from a situation external to the scientific community to a debate going on inside the scientific community generated by the growing relations between university and industries.
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Notes
Practically, it would have been impossible to carry out manually an exhaustive reading of all news articles published in Science (and Scientific Monthly which was absorbed in Science in 1957) since its creation in 1880 in order to find the occurrences of “conflict of interests”. Thanks to the recent availability of the complete electronic collection of Science, a computer search for our chosen expression is now possible and we searched the full-text edition for the expressions « conflict of interest » in singular or plural. The software used by JSTOR allows the recognition of more than 97% of characters. Though we may have missed some occurrences, the general trend is not affected by this limitation.
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Gingras, Y., Gosselin, PM. The Emergence and Evolution of the Expression “Conflict of Interests” in Science: A Historical Overview, 1880–2006. Sci Eng Ethics 14, 337–343 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-008-9063-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-008-9063-8