AT ANY COST

Money Is A Major Motivation In Science Today. Where Does That Leave Truth,
Openness And Public Responsibility*? Daniel S. Greenberg Fears The Worst

"Who holds the patent on this vaccine?" Jonas Salk was asked in 1955 amid
worldwide acclaim for his creation of the first polio vaccine. "Well, the
people, I would say," Salk replied, adding: "There is no patent. Could you
patent the Sun?"

That quaint episode in entrepreneurial innocence dates back to a bygone era
in science, when the thrill of discovery, collegial recognition and service
to mankind were the principal motivations in university based research. In
the contemporary culture of science, that trio survives. But to a
disturbing extent it has been joined and overshadowed by a new force:
money, and the opportunity for professors and their institutions to make
gobs of it by selling their skills and knowledge to industry. Along the
way, some of the great values of science have been trampled, including
truthfulness, openness with colleagues, the public wellbeing, and
responsibility to students.

In the plaintive words of Kary Mullis, the Nobel-prizewinning inventor of
the polymerase chain reaction: "Probably the most important scientific
development of the 20th century is that economics replaced curiosity as the
driving force behind research."

That development is cheered, rather than mourned, by the reigning
scientist-businessmen and politicians, impatient for practical returns from
spending on research. Science for the sake of science, they agree, is a
costly anachronism. Its successor is science for profit.

Industrialised nations, without exception, have adopted schemes to breach
the ivory towers, encourage entrepreneurial spirits, and link the corporate
sector to the once sheltered monastics of university science. Industry now
finances about 9 per cent of the R&D in American universities, and
academe's annual proceeds from royalties and other payments from industry
total about $1 billion. In the fast-moving biomedical sciences, the
productive professor without stock options is a rarity - often pitied for
missing out on the booty.

Is there anything to lament in this fruitful partnership of brains and
commerce? Is corporate money really corrupting science, as is often
contended these days?

For grounds for concern we need only tune into the anguished cries
emanating from many inhabitants of academe as they have become acquainted
with a simple fact of capitalist enterprise: companies exist to make money,
and virtually everything they do is focused on that goal - including deals
with universities.

"We're adopting a business model instead of an education model," a chemist
at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University complained in a 1997
study conducted by the Research Corporation, a foundation that promotes
technology transfer from academe to industry. "The rationale is
collaborations [with industry] are good because they bring in money . . .
There can be benefits, but you're not training students any more; you're
bringing them in to work to satisfy a contract. The emphasis shifts from
what's best for the student to the bottom line."

This shift in emphasis has pervaded broad sectors of academic research. For
example, finding qualified scientists without industrial ties to evaluate
pharmaceutical drugs is increasingly difficult, said Marcia Angell last
year when editor-in-chief of The New England Journal or Medicine (NEJM) She
noted that sometimes "we've had to give up because the first five or six
people on the list all had conflicts".

A conflict of interest looks particularly bad when something goes wrong. In
1999, an 18-year-old volunteer died in a clinical trial at the University
of Pennsylvania's Institute for Human Gene Therapy following infusion with
an experimental gene solution. Afterwards, it was revealed that he had not
been informed of adverse reactions in patients given similar treatments or
of the related deaths of several experimental monkeys. It was later
disclosed that the institute's director held a financial interest in the
experimental treatment. There is no suggestion the two are linked, but a
conflict can cloud people's perceptions.

Financial dealings between researchers and industry "have got entirely out
of control" said Greg Koski on moving from Harvard Medical School to the
directorship of the federal Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP)
last year. He described the system for protecting research volunteers as
"dysfunctional".

In recent years, several medical school professors in the US have been
heavily fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission for insider
profiting on drugs they've tested for pharmaceutical firms. The risk to
patients is clear. Researchers receiving financial support from drugs
companies tend to report favourably on their products in supposedly
objective scientific papers, according to studies published in NEJM and The
Journal of the American Medical Association.

Some efforts at reform have evoked resistance from leading scientific
organisations that should know better. For example, draft guidelines from
the OHRP for exposing and controlling conflicts of interest were rejected
as "premature" by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which
insists that universities be permitted to develop their own systems of
safeguards.

But the good news is that recent assaults on scientific integrity have
stimulated an immune reaction in many influential quarters. Last month,
more than a dozen of the world's leading medical journals announced that
authors would henceforth be required to provide assurances that their
findings were not distorted to suit their sponsors. A joint editorial
explained: "The use of clinical trials primarily for marketing, in our
view, makes a mockery of clinical investigation and is a misuse of a
powerful tool."

Last year, Harvard Medical School dropped plans to loosen its
conflict-of-interest regulations. It retained its limit of 20 per cent on
the proportion of time researchers can spend on outside activities, and its
limit of $20,000 on the amount of stock they can hold in companies that
finance research in their laboratories. Following several cases in the US
in which the government has shut down university research programmes that
were in violation of patient-protection rules, many universities have begun
to tighten surveillance of industry-sponsored clinical trials.

Academe's zest for industrial money ironically comes at a time when a
beneficent Congress has almost doubled the budget of the National
Institutes of Health - to a colossal $23 billion-in a mere five years.
There's plenty of money out there, but also never enough, which guarantees
that academe and industry will continue their tango. The results, in fact,
can be greatly beneficial for society, but the side effects can also be
injurious.

The antidotes are plain to see: insistence on full disclosure of financial
dealings, transparency in all relations with sponsors, and tender care of
science's great traditions of collegial civility. If the professional
societies of science encourage public disclosure and condemn sordid
behaviour in pursuit of financial gain and glory, it would have a
civilising effect on the whole scientific community.

As for Jonas Salk's question about patenting the Sun: sounds improbable,
but that's what lawyers are for.