How should academic research view commercial pressures?

September 30, 2009 9:57 AM

What should the relation between academic research and commercial interests be?

I have to take part in a panel discussion on the degree to which academic research should be informed or led by commercial needs. I have strong feelings about the pernicious influence of commercial interests on academic research, but I could do with some help in fleshing them out, concrete examples of cases where there is clear conflict, etc.

posted by fcummins to society & culture (12 comments total)

Concrete examples, eh? Well, there's Dr. Joseph Biederman, a Harvard psychiatric researcher who took over $1.6 million in undisclosed consulting fees from drug makers basically in exchange for studies showing that atypical anti-psychotics are safe for use in children. He was caught, but not until enormous damage had been done, both to children who were improperly prescribed anti-psychotics and to doctors, many of whom will continue to prescribe these drugs, not knowing that their prescribing habits are based on biased studies.
posted by jedicus at 10:05 AM on September 30

"Profit" isn't a dirty word. A lot of wonderful things have been created by researchers working for, or funded by, private commercial interests.

You did know, didn't you, that the transistor was invented by researchers working for Bell Labs?

Commercial interests are not automatically "pernicious" and that attitude itself is harmful. Your opening question asks what the relation should be, but your question expansion makes clear that you've already made up your mind on that, and what you want from us is to help you prove that you're right.

Beware of confirmation bias.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:28 AM on September 30 [3 favorites]

I don't know what they should be, should be is tough.

but as to how things are:

My first two years of grad school were covered out of money paid to my adviser to test a commercial product's sensitivity to neutrons as well as gamma radiation.

For every horror story like Biederman, there are hundreds of graduate students getting funding, helping them become scientists in the future. The intersection of commercial interests and academic research is also great for getting graduate students jobs when they finish their degrees, a primary mission of the university.

I don't think the effect is wholly pernicious.
posted by pseudonick at 11:00 AM on September 30 [2 favorites]

Clay Shirky gave a talk on accountability in journalism - it seems to have a lot of overlap.

Transparency and accountability are big themes. When you have ghostwriters its a big problem, but mostly because the commercial interests are intentionally deceptive.
posted by infinitefloatingbrains at 11:03 AM on September 30

Lack of disclosure of commerical support of academic research is perhaps the biggest problem. Knowing the source of funding will help people know when to examine results more closely.
posted by exogenous at 11:50 AM on September 30

Not real, but good for reminding people of both their youth and the conscience of their work:
I figure you've increased the power to 6 Megawatts?
posted by Nanukthedog at 12:34 PM on September 30

For every horror story like Biederman, there are hundreds of graduate students getting funding, helping them become scientists in the future. The intersection of commercial interests and academic research is also great for getting graduate students jobs when they finish their degrees, a primary mission of the university.

Perhaps a distinction could be drawn between when the sponsor wants to use the results internally (such as in a new product) and externally (such as to promote an existing product)?
posted by Mike1024 at 12:55 PM on September 30

I see that you're in Ireland, but a lot has been written in the US on the Bayh-Dole Act, which let universities patent the results of federally funded research. I'm not where I can pull a citation, but the Act seems to have had the effect of increasing applied research and research funding without reducing the scope or funding of basic research. Thus, the American experience suggests that it's generally good for the fruits of academic research to be spun off into a business entity for commercialization with appropriate licensing revenue going back to the originating institution.

This is how Google got its start, by the way. The fundamental PageRank patents are owned by Stanford and exclusively licensed to Google in exchange for a licensing fee.

Ireland, like many countries, does not have an equivalent of the Bayh Dole Act. You could consider whether something like it would or would not be a good fit there.
posted by jedicus at 1:01 PM on September 30

In the field of pharmaceutical research, there are two major stages: finding a drug target, and developing a drug for that target. Both are extremely difficult and costly endeavors. But only the latter is capable of generating a profit; the former carries too much risk to outweigh the costs. Most exploratory biomed research either generates nothing, or a very tiny piece of a very large puzzle. It's almost necessarily nonprofit. So NIH and academia mostly performs the first stage of research, while pharmaceutical companies limit themselves to the second. Insofar as the former limits the scope of the latter, the academic field has a lot of power to shape the direction of drug research. And that's ultimately a good thing, because if the market dictated the direction of research, only the most common diseases would ever be studied, and the focus of that research would more often reflect the trivial and short-sighted interests of the marketplace. I imagine if NIH turned for-profit, there would be far less research devoted to cancer, AIDS, and Alzheimer's disease, and far more to erectile dysfunction, frown-lines, and cankles.
posted by dephlogisticated at 3:16 PM on September 30

This response is wonderful. Thank you all very much. I'd like to explain why I appear to have a one-sided view of this issue. (I don't.)

There was an article in the Irish Times, last June (here) in which an academic derided what he called "curiosity based research". He adopted an extreme position (I think) in which research appeared as the natural spawn of commerce.

Here's a quote:

Dr Baker was critical of the “waterfall model” whereby money is poured into early-stage research in the hope that something commercial will come out downstream. “I just don’t think it works,” he said. “It’s inefficient. For me, to commercialise research, you have to have commercial input from the start.”

It turns out that this guy is in the same University, even department, as me. I never met him. But boy do we differ on this issue. You probably don't have time, but if you read his contribution, you will see that his position is extreme.

I wondered how long it would take for the psychopharma issue to appear in the comments. One comment.

Choclate Pickle, I totally get your point.

Turns out, he's chairing the panel that will discuss the relationship between commerce and academic research.

Fun.
posted by fcummins at 6:15 PM on September 30

In my field (biochemistry/biotech), I think it's actually a good thing that we have companies to develop useful products. After the initial exploratory research, which is where most of the excitement and fun and intellectual challenge occur, the rest is largely routine. I'm talking about manufacturing scale-up, QC, and stability studies, which are repetitive, labor-intensive, and frankly a bit boring.

I don't want my tax dollars funding this kind of thing. Biotech companies have the money, equipment, staff and experience to handle the development work much better than academic labs. I want academic labs to do the high-risk work at the bleeding edge of science, and fail 99% of the time. And when they do strike gold, I want them to turn over the plodding stuff to us, and get back to pushing the envelope of human knowledge. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, and I don't want the best minds wasting their time on testing various containers and closure systems for product compatibility - that would kill any graduate student's passion for science stone cold dead.

I like the system in which academic labs license potentially useful discoveries to companies for development. When the system works like it's supposed to, it gives us the best of both worlds: support for research that may never result in anything useful (but just maybe might stumble across a cure for cancer), plus useful products. When the system fails spectacularly it makes headlines (see previous comments) but in my experience it mostly works the way it should, and the 2 pharmaceutical products I've had a (tiny) part in developing both came from licensed academic research.
posted by Quietgal at 6:39 PM on September 30

There was an article in the Irish Times, last June (here) in which an academic derided what he called "curiosity based research". He adopted an extreme position (I think) in which research appeared as the natural spawn of commerce.

IMHO if you're going to discuss this with him, before getting into commercialisation of research, you first want to work out the perspectives you're both looking at the issue from.

One such perspective: The government is spending my tax money on research - why? Because taxpayers will benefit from the fruits of that research.
* Taxpayers might benefit from having the new results exist at all (e.g. computer technology, the internet)
* Taxpayers might benefit economically, such as from licensing revenues/spin-off companies, the country's companies being more competitive due to the discovery, or from educated graduates produced as a byproduct
* Taxpayers might benefit socially, such as giving our country a reputation which makes it easier to attract international talent.
* Taxpayers might hear the results and find it interesting.
* There might be other benefits not included in this list.

You might notice most of those benefits rely on technologies being distributed at a large scale and/or used to make money. If you're using taxpayers' money to produce results and no-one wants to use those results in a way that will benefit taxpayers, aren't you ripping them off rather?
posted by Mike1024 at 3:31 AM on October 1