SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A soda company sponsoring nutrition research. An oil conglomerate helping fund a climate-related research meeting. Does the public care who's paying for science?
In a word, yes. When industry funds science, credibility suffers. And this does not bode well for the types of public-private research partnerships that appear to be becoming more prevalent as government funding for research and development lags.
The recurring topic of conflict of interest has made headlines in recent weeks. The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine has revised its conflict of interest guidelines following questions about whether members of a recent expert panel on GMOs had industry ties or other financial conflicts that were not disclosed in the panel's final report.
Our own recent research speaks to how hard it may be for the public to see research as useful when produced with an industry partner, even when that company is just one of several collaborators.
The study found that participants distrusted any research coming from companies, even when produced by a diverse array of companies or in partnership with the government or non-corporate parties. Is this a real threat to science, as government funding of research declines?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08 2017, @08:37PM (5 children)
Science co-ops will immediately devolve into citizen scientists all screaming at each other for alleged violations of the code of conduct.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Monday May 08 2017, @08:43PM (3 children)
Not entirely true, there will be plenty of turf wars, petty disputes about nothing, and barely restrained corruption, such as exemplifies basically any local politics you stick your nose too deep into.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08 2017, @08:50PM
Any innovative original research will be done in some guy's basement and the guy will take one look at the science lack-of community and decide to forget about publishing the results. So exactly like how science works now.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday May 08 2017, @09:28PM (1 child)
What we need then is research into how to genetically engineer humans to have these undesirable traits eliminated. Then create a retrovirus that spreads the mutation around to everyone.
Of course, there's a danger that everyone could start acting like "pod people", but maybe that's not such a bad thing...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @01:45PM
"Love, desire, ambition, faith - without them, life's so simple, believe me."
"The mind is a strange and wonderful thing. I'm not sure it will ever be able to figure itself out. Everything else maybe, from the atom to the universe. Everything except itself."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @12:33AM
Like Linux kernel devs?