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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: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Monday May 08 2017, @08:40PM (3 children)
Yes, people can be so mentally addled that they can delude themselves into thinking that there is a constant conflict of interest in government science grants that has any meaningful parallel to the profit motive, with fairly consistent outcome targets associated with modern corporate research.
The libertarian bullshit brainwashing that affects these people often causes them to dive so deep into ideology that they toss out anything that even broaches on the possibility of causing them to reflect on their ideals with immediate and vacuous false equivalencies.
It's fatal. Not to the individual libertarian, of course. They rarely seem to suffer the consequences for their obsession with declaring all government inherently evil. No, just to the millions of people who have to suffer their delusional voting patterns.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday May 08 2017, @09:43PM (2 children)
It's fatal. Not to the individual libertarian, of course
Are you suggesting that jmorris is actually brain-dead? That would explain so, so much!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08 2017, @11:42PM (1 child)
Just mostly brain dead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @12:21AM
"'e's gettin' be'er!" [Oh, just to be clear, and help in reading, the " ' " is a glottal stop, not a random apostrophe in someone's beer.]