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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: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday May 09 2017, @01:54PM
Specifically, industry is far more likely to fund applied research than pure research. Industry would never fund NASA, but happily makes use of satellite-based technology that wouldn't have been possible without them. Very few businesses were important players in funding the ARPANet, but look what happened as soon as it became the Internet and was now a functioning communications tool.
Pure research is just too risky and too hard to justify in terms of near-term ROI, and that's all corporate R&D cares about. The challenge is that you never know what areas of pure research will actually turn up something useful or indeed vitally important. Genetics is the perfect example: Gregor Mendel had no clue that 150 years after he was messing around with crossing varieties of peas, we'd know the entire human genome and be in the process of figuring out what the details meant.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.