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December 2007 -- As the story is told, a scientist was discussing with the philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand how her vision of a laissez-faire society would affect scientific projects. She explained that all such projects (apart those undertaken for the limited functions of government) would have to be privately funded, either through corporate research-and-development departments or through foundations.
“You mean,” the scientist said indignantly, “I would have to go to businessmen hat in hand?” Replied Rand, referring to the tax money that supplies public funding: “That’s better than going gun in hand.”
Since that conversation, the U.S. government has come to absorb so much of the gross domestic product that I cannot blame scientists for accepting public grants. Their own taxes will likely pay for them many times over. But the right to accept such coercively obtained funds belongs only to those who advocate an end to the government subsidy of science. And today, unfortunately, more and more scientists seem to be questioning any support of scientific research that is not governmental. They argue that using guns to get their money is not only acceptable but is morally superior to receiving it voluntarily. Private funding of scientific research, they say, corrupts the search for truth.
This line of thinking emerged in a particularly egregious smear of the Heritage Foundation, published by Britain’s prestigious, left-wing Guardian newspaper on February 2, 2007. An article by its science correspondent, Ian Sample, carried the headline: “Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study.” His column opened as follows:
Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a climate change report due to be published today.
Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded think tank with close ties to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered. . . .
Climate scientists described the move yesterday as an attempt to cast doubt over the ‘overwhelming scientific evidence’ on global warming. ‘It’s a desperate attempt by an organization who wants to distort science for their own political aims,’ said David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia….
Ben Stewart of Greenpeace said, ‘The AEI is more than just a thinktank, it functions as the Bush administration’s intellectual Cosa Nostra. They are White House surrogates in the last throes of their campaign of climate change denial. They lost on the science; they lost on the moral case for action. All they’ve got left is a suitcase full of cash.’
On February 5, 2007, the Washington Post picked up the story, albeit with a more cautious headline: “AEI Critiques of Warming Questioned.” Nevertheless, the story’s opening paragraphs read:
A Washington-based think tank has been soliciting critiques of the just-released international assessment of the evidence on climate change, a move that prompted some academics and environmentalists to accuse the group of seeking to distort the latest evidence for global warming.
Advocacy groups such as Greenpeace and the Public Interest Research Group questioned why the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has offered $10,000 to academics willing to contribute to a book on climate-change policy, an overture that was first reported Friday in London's Guardian newspaper.
Notice, first, that the Guardian said AEI was trying to cast doubt on “global warming.” That attribution of motives was pure, unfounded speculation. The Post said, correctly, that AEI was seeking, first, “critiques” of a UN report, “especially as it bears on policy responses,” and, secondly, contributions to a book on the proper political policy to adopt with reference to climate-change. Both activities are entirely legitimate for a political think-tank. The science of climatology, after all, does not generate conclusions in political philosophy. Yet both of AEI’s activities were made to seem nefarious by being tied to the payment of money and by being linked to contributions that AEI has received from ExxonMobil (all of $250,000 a year, according to the company’s environmentalist detractors).
Well, so what? Media smears of the right are so ubiquitous as to be hardly worth mentioning. But this particular smear of the Heritage Foundation does deserve attention. For it exemplifies a profound attack that is now underway on the ethical and epistemological acceptability of the capitalist system.
A few days after the Guardian attacked AEI, the Wall Street Journal’s radical-left news pages launched a similar attack. But this time it was not aimed at a right-wing think tank; it was aimed at a respected scientist who used private corporate funding for his research. The particular target of the attack was Michael Fiore, a professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin and one of the nation’s leading experts on what works and what doesn’t work for people who want to give up smoking. In 2005, when the Department of Justice was prosecuting the big anti-tobacco case U.S. v. Philip Morris, Dr. Fiore was asked by the government to submit expert testimony on the difficulties of quitting smoking. But not even such a background in the crusade against tobacco could not immunize Dr. Fiore from the taint of having accepted private money for his work.
It's the Enlightenment approach to science that today’s critics of private funding want to reverse.
It would be funny if the stakes were not so high. Just when most Americans probably thought companies promoting smoking were the founts of all corrupt science, Journal reporter Kevin Helliker implied that companies—such as GlaxoSmithKline, which makes the anti-smoking aid Nicorette—were also corrupting science by funding research. The Journal’s ominous page-one headline told readers all they needed to know about the matter: “Behind Antismoking Policy, Influence of Drug Industry.” And the lead paragraph left no doubt of the message: “Michael Fiore is in charge of revising federal guidelines on how to get smokers to quit. He also runs an academic research center funded in part by drug companies that make quit-smoking aids, and he personally has received tens of thousands of dollars in speaking and consulting fees from those companies.”
Who would have guessed? Big Anti-Tobacco is no less evil than Big Tobacco. But what, exactly, is the evil intent here? We know smoking is unhealthy. What, precisely, is the injury that the Anti-Tobacco Octopus is spending millions to inflict on unsuspecting Americans? Apparently, it is trying to lure them away from the wholesome ritual of going cold turkey. The Journal’s final anecdote, as usual, seals its message: “During the 20 years that Tanya Blakey, a Georgia teacher, smoked two packs a day, she tried to quit countless times using nicotine-replacement therapy. ‘Every time I stopped using the [Nicotine Replacement Therapy], I was smoking again within two or three days,’ says Ms. Blakey. This week she is celebrating two years without a cigarette, this time having used no medication.”
In the following month, the crusade against private funding was taken up by the New York Times. “Doctors’ Ties to Drug Makers Are Put on Close View” screamed the page-one headline on March 21, 2007. The piece was a broad-based attack on all financial links between doctors and pharmaceutical companies. But the lead anecdote, which set the tone for the entire piece, focused on Allan Collins, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota. Declared the paper: He may be “the most influential kidney specialist in the country. He is president of the National Kidney Foundation and director of a government-financed research center on kidney disease.” Ah, but there is more to this Collins fellow than meets the eye, it seems. “In 2004, the year he was chosen as president-elect of the kidney foundation, the pharmaceutical company Amgen, which makes the most expensive drugs used in the treatment of kidney disease, underwrote more than $1.9 million worth of research and education programs led by Dr. Collins, according to records examined by The New York Times. In 2005, Amgen paid Dr. Collins at least $25,800, mostly in consulting and speaking fees, the records show.” The Times then rounded up another kidney specialist, Daniel Coyne, to take a swipe at Collins: “Amgen’s funding for Dr. Collins’s [Minneapolis Medical Research Foundation] is another huge financial connection to individuals at the National Kidney Foundation. The foundation’s recent pro-industry anemia guidelines—and the revisions due next month—have to be viewed with great skepticism.”
Dr. Coyne’s characterization the NKF's guidelines as “pro-industry” would seem to imply that he thinks they are incorrect in some way. But no. In an article he wrote for a nephrology journal, he said that “the guideline recommendations may be entirely correct. . . . [But] some offer large economic benefits for drug manufacturers and dialysis corporations. Many of these corporations fund the guideline process. . . [and] these interconnections will lead many to question the integrity and the independence of highly influential practice guidelines.” It is an instructive piece of reasoning, as we shall see.
In its October 2007 issue, the popular science magazine Discover undertook to broaden the various attacks on specific scientific and medical fields. Its article “Science under Siege” stated that “the biggest threat to science has been quietly occurring under the radar, even though it may be changing the very foundation of American innovation. The threat is money—specifically, the decline of government support for science and the growing dominance of private spending over American research.” The article quotes a certain Merrill Goozner of the (Ralph Nader–affiliated) Center for Science in the Public Interest: “The whole scientific revolution, which was a product of the Enlightenment, is threatened when you commercialize science.”
Now, that remark is interesting for its confusions. To a considerable extent, the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century was indeed a product of aristocratic, non-commercial institutions such as Oxford University, Cambridge University, and the Royal Society. But the Enlightenment, the eighteenth century, gave us the practical application of science—in fact, it gave us the Industrial Revolution—and that was very largely a product of private commercial entrepreneurs. Thus, it is precisely the Enlightenment approach to science that today’s critics of private funding want to reverse.
Several premises provide the foundation for the attack on privately funded science, and they are, as one might suppose, anti-Enlightenment. The first is a belief that the search for truth must be conducted by a scientific priesthood. In their book Why Truth Matters, Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom argue that, while material interests can shape scientific inquiry, true scientists “often have an interest in understanding, in getting things right, in getting at the truth, in seeing things as they really are in themselves.” That is unusual, they admit, but “scientists and enquirers are equally notoriously an unworldly, peculiar bunch.” Thus, objectivity depends upon “unworldly” truth-seekers, funded by institutions as little concerned with practical results as the researchers themselves. Recall that Dr. Coyne, without questioning the accuracy of the anemia guideline recommendations, said that the mere fact of private funding cast doubt on them. The premise, presumably, is that the pursuit of material value naturally tends to bias one against the pursuit of truth.
A second premise is pure Kantianism—a belief that actions undertaken for individual benefit are inherently base. Sheldon Krimsky, the author of Science in the Private Interest, offered just that perspective in an interview with the New York Times on September 23, 2003. The interviewer began by remarking: “You note [in your book] that neither Jonas Salk nor the March of Dimes, which supported his work, decided to patent or receive royalties from the discovery of a polio vaccine. What has changed since then?” Krimsky replied: “When Jonas Salk was questioned about patenting the vaccine, he replied, ‘Could you patent the sun?’ For him, he was doing something in the public interest.”
A third premise is linked to the first two, and it was actually characteristic of the late French Enlightment, though never of the Anglo-American Enlightenment: It is a belief in the rule of experts and a consequent rejection of the free market.
In a free society, each individual would be allowed to decide whether the risks of a certain drug were acceptable to him.
No one would protest if ExxonMobil funded cosmology research. Why should they protest if it funds climate research? The obvious answer is that the government uses such research as the basis for its coercive regulations, and companies often fund research in order to minimize the extent of the coercion. That angers many scientists, who hold to the old socialist belief that the government regulation of business can be and ought to be as objective as science and technology. As noted above, the writer for the Guardian completely failed to distinguish between the scientific question of global warming and the policy question of dealing with it, presumably because he assumed that both should properly be handled the same experts.
During his interview with the Times, Sheldon Krimsky expressed a similar outlook with regard to drugs. “If studies are heavily funded by companies that control the data and there is a biasing effect, drugs can get on the market that shouldn’t be on the market.” Obviously, Krimsky believes that experts like himself can say what drugs should and should not be on the market.
In a free society, of course, each individual would be allowed to decide whether the risks of a certain drug were acceptable to him. As a result, riskier drugs would probably have smaller sales than safer and equally effective drugs. But drugs that were uniquely effective might have substantial sales even though they carried high risks. That would depend on the evaluations made by individuals. But of course that is not how the present system works. Currently, a drug can be banned from the marketplace outright if “experts” at the FDA determine that its risks are “unacceptable.”
The point applies outside the field of medical research as well. Leftists have successfully promulgated the belief that activities posing virtually any degree or risk or any degree of harm must be strictly regulated by government, whether the activity is taking drugs, or burning gasoline, or smoking tobacco, or consuming food additives. Under the circumstances, it is perfectly natural for companies to hire scientists who will try to discredit the evidence urged by alarmists. After all, if the alarmists get their way, the companies are going to be robbed by government coercion of money they could have legitimately earned. The situation is no different from that of a company defending itself against a civil suit and facing a large fine; it would have every right to hire experts who would undermine the evidence of the plaintiff.
In sum, the contest over private funding is not, as its opponents say, between objective scientists and biased scientists. In the end, the contest is between two groups of scientists wrestling to get their hands on a government gun. What such “science” needs is not less private funding, but more gun control.
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