The financial crisis of 2008 was heralded as the end of the West's love affair with free-market capitalism. The combined crashes of banking industry and real estate market should have been the final nail in the coffin for the unbridled power of corporations, who for decades have flaunted all social responsibility in search of profit. Why is it then, as we see the dust slowly settling, that nothing appears to have changed?
In contrast, science has come increasingly under fire - from the joking (but only just) "end of the world" reports at last year's switch-on of the Large Hadron Collider to the ever-growing stronghold of religion on our education systems, belief in science seems at an all-time low. Scientific evidence on harm from drugs, on the benefits of childhood vaccinations, on evolution: no one's buying it. The Daily Mail, after all still the voice of many people, compares today's scientists to Nazis. Sometimes I wonder, in our disillusionment with the free market, did science become the fall guy?
Multinational corporations have never been known as bastions of ethical behaviour. Particularly in the developing world, where unstable governments leave power vacuums open to cash-bearing foreigners, their record is chequered at best. At home their influence is everywhere: industrial lobbies have the cash and the clout to win elections, influence the political agenda and win our hearts and minds.
In science too companies have flexed their muscle. Private investment in science research, particularly in medical fields, has without doubt enabled many breakthroughs and a better quality of life for us all. Physics has benefited hugely from corporate R&D - witness the number of Nobel Prizes awarded to Bell Labs scientists, or the rapid advances in condensed matter and nanotechnology research of the last decade. And in today's climate of crisis, governments are placing increasing pressure on universities to push ahead in their courtship of private investment.
Disclosure: I too am a product of this strategy. My PhD project was partly funded by British defense company QinetiQ, and learned a lot from the excellent engineers they employ. My industry experience, however minimal, has helped me get ahead in my career as a scientist.
But here's the catch. By inviting private investment into our universities, governments are essentially putting science up for sale.
And companies are loving it. Science is the ultimate marketing tool. It's true, it's science. They pick it, they choose it, they wrap it up, they sell it. Teamed up with a publishing industry that is just as profit-driven as they are, the companies can essentially control the entire research cycle: the investment, publication, patenting, commercialisation.
Why are we surprised at the rise of the antivax movement? Vaccines are produced by the same companies that sell us drugs that don't work, or worse, turn out to make our kids suicidal. Why should we trust them? This is not a one-off incidence. Spend an hour reading posts at Bad Science or Science Based Medicine and you'll gain an inkling of how endemic misrepresentation of scientific results is in the pharmaceutical industry. For those people who are unaware of funding strcutures and clinical trials procedures (and the Daily Mail won't tell them), it doesn't matter who hides what. The public's waning confidence in vaccines is a spectacular own goal for pharmaceutical research.
In last year's financial crisis, how quick were analysts to point the finger at the quants - the "geeks bearing formulas" who had us all fooled with their so-called scientific models of markets rising forever. While presumably no one in the crash was free of guilt, blaming the science guy is clearly an easy way out. The meltdown was the result of bad business decisions, not just bad science.
In the ongoing debate about climate change, scientific argument is drowned out by slickly produced disinformation campaigns funded by private industry and special interest groups. Backed up by large amounts of cash, energy companies have been able to dress up these campaigns as science. And who can tell the difference?
It seems to me that in all these instances science is being hijacked to protect the financial interests of corporate giants. As a result, scientists are losing their credibility.
While private investment in science can be very beneficial to all involved, the relationship needs to be redefined to better protect scientific integrity. Governments need to start supporting science in a real way, not just with cash, but by helping safeguard the independence that lies at the core of science research. I hope today's annoucement about the British government's new guidelines for science advisers are backed up by action.
Let's not end up in a society where science can be bought casually on a street corner. That, Mr.Wilson, would truly be hell on earth.
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"Vaccines are produced by the same companies that sell us drugs that don't work, or worse, turn out to make our kids suicidal".
This is tabloid blogging along the lines of the tabloid reporting you rightly despise.
My reading of the sentence is that it's common for pharmaceutical companies to produce drugs that that make kids suicidal. The link actually went to a 2005 story that reported a single instance where claims were made against Seroxat. My stats is too rusty to work out whether the numbers reported are statistically significant but I did wonder. I did note that there were no actual suicides, and this among a group of people suffering from anxiety or depression who might be more than usually inclined to suicide than the general population.
In any event, the headline did not appear to be justified by the small print.
(Postscript: one also wonders where the profit motive would come from in selling unsafe medicine.)
Of course, I totally agree with you. While I deplore some of big pharma's practices, particularly when it comes to the way clinical trials are conducted, I am completely and utterly in favour of vaccination programmes. I have also spent time working in the NHS in Britain and saw first-hand how pharmaceutical companies successfully work with doctors and nurses to improve the drugs they provide, methods of drug delivery etc.
The point I was making, though not very successfully it seems, perhaps I missed out some well-placed " ", is that one of the reasons people seem increasingly distrustful of scientific evidence, is because their experience is dominated by these scandals that become the subject of Panorama programmes and receive weeks of coverage in the red tops (this is what happened with the Seroxat case). And in these instances, as in the additional examples I quoted above, these companies hide behind science - dodgy science.
This has, I suspect, created a distrust in the whole concept of science in many people, who see it as a game of numbers that can be manipulated to the user's advantage. This is really harmful to the credibility of science as a whole in society, which is a really dangerous state of affairs.
I agree that there is both a perception of unethical practice by large companies and also, in some well-publicised cases, poor practice.
This is what led me to join IBM in 1981: I found their principles, including one on corporate social responsibility, a revelation. That didn't mean IBM always did the right thing, but it generally tried to. (I have since left IBM, but I look back on it with fond memories.)
As a whole, I believe large corporations have become more ethical in recent years. The publicised exceptions are just that - exceptions. That doesn't mean we should relax our scrutiny, but I worry that too often good actions by corporates or scientists are greeted with undue suspicion.
This is why I like this blog, as well as Ben Goldacre's Bad Science and the excellent Sense About Science. They get down to the facts, without fear or favour.