Rand Simberg compares and contrasts today's NASA bureaucracy with what it's been able to accomplish in the past. An obvious question comes to mind: NASA, working in partnership with some of the best aerospace and high-tech companies in the world, used to be arguably most innovative organization on the planet. So what the heck happened?
Dr. Richard Lindzen, a professor of Meteorology at MIT, has a fascinating piece in this week's Wall Street Journal. In it, he notes a disturbingly common trend in government-funded research in the area of Global Warming and Climate Change:
Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policy makers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes. After all, who puts money into science--whether for AIDS, or space, or climate--where there is nothing really alarming? Indeed, the success of climate alarmism can be counted in the increased federal spending on climate research from a few hundred million dollars pre-1990 to $1.7 billion today. It can also be seen in heightened spending on solar, wind, hydrogen, ethanol and clean coal technologies, as well as on other energy-investment decisions.
But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.
You can read the rest right here, where he gives more details and examples.
It reminds me of what my friend (I'm increasingly able to call him that) Peter Duesberg's written about in his own area, molecular biology, wherein he notes the power of a small minority of scientists to control huge areas of government funding and publishable research, almost completely unaccounably and anonymously. Their power to do so, he notes:
...lays in the structure of the large, government-sponsored research programs that dominate academic research since World War II (Duesberg 1996b). Such programs favour individual investigators who contribute to the establishment a maximum of data and a minimum of controversy. However, if individual researchers move into new directions, that threaten the scientific and commercial investments of the establishment, the establishment can impose various sanctions via the "peer review system". The most powerful of these are denial of funding and of publication.
The peer review system derives its power from the
little known practice of governments to deputize their
authority to distribute funds for research to committees of "experts". These experts are academic researchers distinguished by outstanding contributions to the current establishment. They alone review the merits of research applications from their peers, and they have the right to elect each other to review committees. Outwardly, this "peer review system" appears to the unsuspecting government and taxpayer as the equivalent of a jury system – free of all conflicts of interest. But, in view of the many professional and commercial investments in and benefits from their expertise, and even of the rewards from their universities and institutions for the corresponding overheads and partnerships – all legal in the US since president Reagan – "peer reviewers" do not fund applications that challenge their own interests (Duesberg 1996b; Lang 1998; Zuger 2001). Since "peer review" is protected by anonymity, does not allow the applicant personal representation or an independent representative, nor a say or even a veto in the selection of the "jury", and does not allow an appeal, its powers to defend the orthodoxy are unlimited. The corporate equivalent of academia’s "peer review system” would be to give General Motors and Ford the authority to review and veto all innovations by less established carmakers competing for the consumer.
You can read the rest of that remarkable paper in PDF form right here. But please note: here he is not attacking the concept of peer review in general. Read what it says closely: he is attacking the practice of anonymous "peer review" boards which control all the funding.
Meanwhile, Dr. Marcia Angell, former Editor-In-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, has written extensively about how in yet another area of scientific research--namely, drug research--this entire increasingly unaccountable system operates. Since the early 1980s, for the best of reasons, the U.S. government began funding a lot of drug research itself, both directly and indirectly. There were many reforms along these lines that were well-intentioned but may need re-examination. For example:
The most important of these laws is known as the Bayh-Dole Act, after its chief sponsors, Senator Birch Bayh (D-Ind.) and Senator Robert Dole (R-Kans.). Bayh-Dole enabled universities and small businesses to patent discoveries emanating from research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the major distributor of tax dollars for medical research, and then to grant exclusive licenses to drug companies. Until then, taxpayer-financed discoveries were in the public domain, available to any company that wanted to use them. But now universities, where most NIH-sponsored work is carried out, can patent and license their discoveries, and charge royalties. Similar legislation permitted the NIH itself to enter into deals with drug companies that would directly transfer NIH discoveries to industry.
Bayh-Dole gave a tremendous boost to the nascent biotechnology industry, as well as to big pharma. Small biotech companies, many of them founded by university researchers to exploit their discoveries, proliferated rapidly. They now ring the major academic research institutions and often carry out the initial phases of drug development, hoping for lucrative deals with big drug companies that can market the new drugs. Usually both academic researchers and their institutions own equity in the biotechnology companies they are involved with. Thus, when a patent held by a university or a small biotech company is eventually licensed to a big drug company, all parties cash in on the public investment in research.
These laws mean that drug companies no longer have to rely on their own research for new drugs, and few of the large ones do. Increasingly, they rely on academia, small biotech startup companies, and the NIH for that.[7] At least a third of drugs marketed by the major drug companies are now licensed from universities or small biotech companies, and these tend to be the most innovative ones.[8] While Bayh-Dole was clearly a bonanza for big pharma and the biotech industry, whether its enactment was a net benefit to the public is arguable.
The Reagan years and Bayh-Dole also transformed the ethos of medical schools and teaching hospitals. These nonprofit institutions started to see themselves as "partners" of industry, and they became just as enthusiastic as any entrepreneur about the oppor-tunities to parlay their discoveries in-to financial gain. Faculty researchers were encouraged to obtain patents on their work (which were assigned to their universities), and they shared in the royalties. Many medical schools and teaching hospitals set up "technology transfer" offices to help in this activity and capitalize on faculty discoveries. As the entrepreneurial spirit grew during the 1990s, medical school faculty entered into other lucrative financial arrangements with drug companies, as did their parent institutions.
One of the results has been a growing pro-industry bias in medical research —exactly where such bias doesn't belong. Faculty members who had earlier contented themselves with what was once referred to as a "threadbare but genteel" lifestyle began to ask themselves, in the words of my grandmother, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" Medical schools and teaching hospitals, for their part, put more resources into searching for commercial opportunities.
You can read Angell's lengthy indictment of how an opaque, accountability-free bureaucracy effectively controls almost all government funding for drug research these days, and how almost all drug research is now funded by the government, not the private drug companies, right here.
By coincidence, another former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Jerome P. Kassirer, has a book out where he expounds on similar themes: Precious little research is really being done by the private sector; more and more of it is being done through government grants; the regulating agencies are dominated by industry insiders; the profit motives are intense and terribly seductive; the "peer review" process for giving out grants is mostly anonymous and built on a good-ol-boy network of mutually supporting researchers; and surprisingly fewer real innovations in research area actually happening, at least in areas where the biggest research money is being done.
What is most important about all of this is that it didn't used to be this way. This lack of accountability, this lack of transparency in the funding process, is a relatively new phenomenon, but it's one that's eating away at free inquiry and real science in too many areas where the confluence of big government and big business collude. And none of it--or very, very little of it, anyway--actually requires any mustache-twirling villains or vast conspiracies.
All it requires is billions of dollars, and an operating environment so laden with fear and croneyism and bureaucratic inertia that it allows things to happen every day that would never pass the due disclosure requirements for any new business seeking investors, or any manual on ethical practices in business or government.
That's not an "anti-government" thing, nor is it an "anti business" thing. It's a "we need to start thinking about how to reform the system" kind of thing.
As I've often said, if you don't want the dirty, dirty politics in your science, stop taking the dirty, dirty political money--and that includes all the political money, including the tax breaks, the government contracts to provide services, the patent protections, and everything else. Otherwise, we need to demand more accountability, more transparency, more clear objectives, and more scrutiny.
The question is, do we have the will to do it? Or will we allow the "scientific community" and the "medical community" to maintain an aura of mystique and holiness that cannot be questioned?
