10 ms·

Is Money Corrupting Research?

107 points by bpolania 11y ago

WalterBright 11y ago
Of course it is, and always has been. And whether the money comes from private or public sources does not change that. It's why having a free marketplace of ideas is important.
- grayclhn 11y ago
  There's a pretty big difference between research funding from a private group that wants support/pr for actions it's already decided to take, and research funding that's allocated by a group of one's scientific peers. Even if there's some element of "corruption" in pandering to granting agencies, paying for PR cover under the guise of research is a lot worse.
GauntletWizard 11y ago
No. Those with an actual stake in the decisions deserve more of a voice in it than those who would only vote themselves a full stomach. The US is explicitly designed that those who are successful in the past (have money) have more of a voice than those who have failed (haven't money).
- andrewstuart2 11y ago
  Not having money is most certainly not a sign that you've failed. Having money is also most certainly not a sign that you've been successful. Generational wealth and poverty are real. By your measure, the current Kardashian generation would be considered among the best and brightest in America. Wealth is only a goal for some people, and I'd argue that the best and brightest are more likely to perceive that maybe a rat race to the top isn't the best use of their limited time on earth.
  - GauntletWizard 11y ago
    Generational wealth is real. So is generational knowledge. My father taught me a large part of what I know. Why deny those who have inherent advantages from taking advantage of such? Oh, right, because you believe in a Harrison Bergeron-esque future in which everyone with talent is handicapped til they are at the level of the lowest retard. I wish you all deserved success with that.
    - dang 11y ago
      > Oh, right, because you believe in a Harrison Bergeron-esque future in which everyone with talent is handicapped til they are at the level of the lowest retard. This comment breaks the HN guidelines by being uncivil and unsubstantive. We ban accounts that do this. Please read the guidelines and follow them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- neolefty 11y ago
  First, if success is defined by profit, then where do advocacy for justice, safety, and protecting the commons fit in? They are just as important for government to hear about as profit-generating business interests. Second, that argument sounds like Laissez-Faire economics, where those who succeed are enabled to succeed more. In practice, it leads to imbalances and winner-take-all problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez-faire#Critiques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez-faire#Critiques On the other hand, excessive regulation can suffocate innovation. So you need a balance. The debate comes when you try to figure out what the balance should be. In academia, that balance includes disclosure, peer-review, and openness. It's far from perfect, but we're working on it. But this article is mostly about government and policy that is informed by research, and the serious imbalances, information asymmetries, and lack of voice of non-business interests.
  - GauntletWizard 11y ago
    Justice, Safety, and protecting the commons are perfectly satisfied by the interests of the wealthy. The absolute first thing that wealth wants is safety and order, and central to that is a well-functioning police force. Unless wealth has been entirely monopolized, that will involve a coalition of monied interests. We're not quite at the point of a private police force, though we're close, due to the raging ineffectiveness that BLM and similar movements are pushing for.
- jbapple 11y ago
  1. This comment does not at all address the actual article, which includes a decision in which individual investors and the mutual fund companies that sell them products both have "an actual stake", and yet only one of these has the organizational infrastructure to commission a study that aims to 2. . . . "vote[s] themselves a full stomach" by preventing regulation requiring them to act in the best interests of the people who they are giving financial advice to. 3. This comment then notes that the US is "explicitly designed" so that those with more money have more power. I suppose this historical note is meant to convince the reader that this is a good thing, but that seems pretty bizarre.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
tarekkurdy 11y ago
Yes.
- onedev 11y ago
  Thank you. Now let's discuss some solutions.
- friendzis 11y ago
  Simple yes is not enough - it is much more complex than the article explains. Private funding is just the tip of the iceberg - private companies want their own opinions written in scientific manner, with facts taken and hidden to support that opinion. Is it good or bad? It actually does not matter - it is that way. But this applies only for paid papers. There is a whole another category - paid research/engineering projects. Scientists doing the work expect to publish something. Yet the meat of the research has to remain hidden for the company investing to hold market advantage. Result? Technical babble in papers. And it is quite often hard as hell to find which pieces of the paper are not honest. Government funding application forms usually include a field labeled something like "Expected result/outcome". So you cannot just get funding without certainty of success in one form or another. Which basically results in funding directed to projects with some preliminary results. And those preliminary results are funded from another projects and so the cycle goes. This is very well illustrated in PhD Comics [1]. One of the core reasons behind all of this mess are funding gatekeepers: private companies know what they want and will pay for that particular output. Public funding is usually behind some Government Agency where the same set of people review funding applications and... "known to be well behaving" (delivering promised results) researchers are much more likely to get funded, see [1]. Either way, it is next to impossible to do what in my book is actual research - come up with a new idea and get funding to test whether it has any grounds at all. [1]: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd050611s.gif http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd050611s.gif Edit: fixed link
Fomite 11y ago
Disclaimer: I have done privately funded research. I'd say the answer is likely 'yes' - even for those who are trying to be conscious about it, there's a desire for things to work, to make people...well...happy. No one is going to be really excited to know their drug is shit. I've heard private industry researchers talk about this, even in companies that make an effort to shield research from finances - you don't want to let the team down. On the other hand, you know what else corrupts research? Wondering where the funding for your soft money lab is going to come from. How you're going to pay your grad students, technicians, etc. Research costs money, and the government has been providing less and less of it. The gap has to be made up somewhere.
- dluan 11y ago
  I'm going to argue that direct public funding is the best way, and by that I mean the historical analogy of direct patronage or crowdfunding research today (e.g. experiment.com). Today's 'big science' grant funding model is so far removed from the average citizen or constituent, that by the time they see or feel the impact, it's hardly recognizable anymore. Because it's behind paywalls, or is too technical, or locked in IP, or anti-collaboration. What we need to solve this problem is a direct connection with research and science. If you were motivated to go out and seek an answer for yourself, then perhaps you'd be less likely to lean on witnesses, testimony, or experts that you don't understand. The reality is that before the internet, people never really had that ability to go out and seek the truth for themselves. And I mean 'Truth' with a capital T, within significance, reproducible, and transparent. At least that's best thing short of everyone becoming a scientist, or doing science independently.
  - ori_b 11y ago
    > Today's 'big science' grant funding model is so far removed from the average citizen or constituent, that by the time they see or feel the impact, it's hardly recognizable anymore. Because it's behind paywalls, or is too technical, or locked in IP, or anti-collaboration. Fundamental research often has no direct impact on the public. If it does, it's often 10 or 20 years down the line. Fundamentally research is, by it's nature, removed from the impact it has. Nobody knows what the final results will be. This isn't conducive to crowdfunding.
dluan 11y ago
I'd say this article is more along the lines "Is money corrupting politics?", especially as the outcomes of research in this context is usually are aimed at policy (or rather, justifying policy to the masses). If you want to tackle the shame that is using science as a populist tool for denialism, that you are allowed to conjure up an expert witness for any contrarian point of view or agenda, then you must tackle this problem head on. Front and center of this is the congressional ban on gun research. Probably the first step would be to change the way we present data and facts to policy-makers in a more sophisticated way, e.g. shorter review periods, or being able to democratically control those who sit on these committees. Or better, have more knowledgeable people there in the first place. Something something, series of tubes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes).
- marcelsalathe 11y ago
  Great points Denny. Btw, have you thought about soliciting gun research on experiment.com?
  - dluan 11y ago
    https://experiment.com/projects/gun-control-research-project https://experiment.com/projects/gun-control-research-project
- dekhn 11y ago
  The series of tubes comment was completely correct. The internet is a series (well, a parallel) of tubes. They carry light, not tubes pneumatically pushed by air, but if you're a 300 year old senator, whatever analogy works.
dnautics 11y ago
Can publically funded research also be banned from indirect testimony? Isn't there also a conflict of interest if someone doing research on the federal dime is testifying as an expert to congress, which ostensibly is making decisions about future funding? presumably testimony that unabashedly is hearing about continued funding (e.g. progress reports) should be OK.
- grayclhn 11y ago
  Probably a decent rule of thumb is: does disclosing the source of funding make the research conclusion less credible? In TFA -- yes, to the point that it wasn't fully disclosed. For publicly funded research -- probably not.
rcthompson 11y ago
Well, they've certainly found an exception to the rule that "if the title is a question, the answer is no."
- nicklaf 11y ago
  The exception applies to this article too: http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/is-america-an-oligarchy http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/is-america-an-oli... Strangely enough, on the same general topic. Perhaps it's taboo to point out the obvious when the topic is the corrupting influence of money.
Fede_V 11y ago
Credible research institutions have no problems publishing white papers or research reports discussing their own research. For example, Microsoft Research is fully financed by Microsoft, but they have a sterling academic reputation which they've earned by doing top tier independent research. On the flipside, absolutely nobody will believe research coming out from Shell that says that climate change concerns are overblown, or by Philip Morris that dismisses the health harms of smoking. This is why when energy companies want to contest research funding, they attempt to buy out credible scientists and ask them to speak in their own name: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/feb/02/frontpagenews.climatechange http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/feb/02/frontpage...
kriro 11y ago
The article is only about a fraction of the issue, namely expert witness/report payments. The title is also a bit silly since money (mostly tax payer money in case of academics) is also what makes research possible in the first place. That being said I think it's really hard to be objective if you get funding from a private source with a certain agenda. There's some people who can pull it off and I have a lot of respect for them but for me it would simply be impossible to say with good consciousness that I wasn't influenced at all. However government money for research also has issues (I can only talk about how it works in Germany but it's similar in most of Europe). Namely I think the practice of research projects is somewhat questionable. You need to build a consortium of anywhere form 3-10ish partners and write a proposal and hope it gets accepted. This results in 2-4 year projects that are funded. Sounds decent enough at first glance but the devil is in the details. First of all it is not a blind process so I fully expect some institutions/individuals to get more or less autoaccepted due to name recognition alone. I can't say for sure but there's humans involved so anything else would surprise me. That unfortunately adds a political dimension. As a young academic you (and your professor) rely on a stream of funded projects to keep you employed (there's also non project-money jobs but these get rarer and rarer and are usually limited to 50% employment time) which means that your freedom of research is fairly limited (you can't really publish a paper that isn't related to the project and go to a conference for example) and more importantly there's a constant need to reacquire new funding. If I were to guess people spend anywhere form 20-40% of their time trying to get new projects and not working on the actual projects they have already secured. And of course this need for project money gives governments a good way of influencing what research is being conducted (which is somewhat opposed to the principle of freedom in research) as only things they offer will get funded. Lastly, it is surprisingly hard to do research as an individual with no institutional backing if one doesn't happen to have a good chunk of money set aside. Access to pay walled stuff (can be circumvented) and the need to travel to conferences (at least in CS) and depending on your field the need for costly equipment and access to test subjects. There's some developments in this regard (citizen research) and I hope it'll get easier because I think there's quite a few capable people who'd enjoy spending their free time on research that interests them and publish it when done.
innocentoldguy 11y ago
Of course it is! If the government, or some other entity, is going to give you a ton of grant money to prove, let's say, global warming, the options are to either "prove" it or watch your funding evaporate. What would you choose?
- andygates 11y ago
  That's not even wrong. Ton of money - lol nope. "To prove" rather than "to investigate" shows a PR-tainted lack of understanding the method. And if you publish rubbish, it's your reputation that's shot down when the papers showing how bad it is come round.
tracker1 11y ago
"Should congressional testimony and expert witnesses be banned and private funding of research prohibited? Eliminating private funding will leave research completely in public funding’s hands. It will not eliminate the bias; it will simply tilt it in the direction of the government." This is definitely a fact.. look how long it took for the lipid theory to be seriously challenged... years of research in support of what the government would fund. The food pyrimid is probably the best example of the results of this. As long as business and politics are so intertwined, putting government in charge isn't a viable solution in and of itself. It would be nice to see some efforts put towards pure/directed research... Unfortunately that's a hard sell to a lot of people who simply don't see the value.
tljr 11y ago
How can it not.
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
This is a curious exception to Betteridge's Law. If the question is 'Is Money Corrupting <thing>?', then the answer is almost always yes.
- amelius 11y ago
  I guess the answer is always what you don't want it to be :)
SQL2219 11y ago
yes. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/central-figure-in-cdc-vac_b_494303.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/central-fi...
ThomPete 11y ago
I Danish there is an expression called "grundforskning" (fundamental research). It's research done to create new knowledge but without any specific application in mind. It's the foundation of future applied technologies just like quantum mechanics was for the laser. When the government stop putting money into "fundamental research" it hurts everyones ability to maybe come up with revolutionary solutions for problems in the future. Integral Research used to give their researchers a decade to find a way to make their research applicable I remember in the beginning of the zeroes it was down to a 3 years or something like that. The question we need to ask ourselves is not whether it's corrupting research but weather it's corrupting our future.
randomsearch 11y ago
Timely podcast from Stuff You Should Know on lobbying in the USA: http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/how-lobbying-works/ http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/how-lobbying-work...
mobiuscog 11y ago
I'd argue it's also corrupting the education system, as (definitely in the UK) Universities only really want to employ people who can 'assist' in being awarded research grants. Employ people who will research the correct topics in the correct way to provide the largest amounts of funding to... continue the cycle.
smanzer 11y ago
I remember being interviewed randomly on the street by local TV news for a "student's opinion" on Berkeley's Energy Biosciences Institute, which was funded by BP. This was during Deepwater Horizon, and they were despised as much here as anywhere. The research seemed pretty useful though, and it's great to get that kind of funding given how tight grants are these days. When the goal of the corporate funding is to build something, rather than to "impartially" assess policies on which the corporation has a well-defined self-interested position, then the process seems less prone to corruption. Still pretty controversial though now that they are pulling funding: http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2015-02-20/not-so-fast-uc-berkeley-biofuel-research-takes-hit-bp-oil http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2015-...
worik 11y ago
paywalled

107 points by bpolania 11y ago

Of course it is, and always has been. And whether the money comes from private or public sources does not change that. It's why having a free marketplace of ideas is important.

grayclhn 11y ago
There's a pretty big difference between research funding from a private group that wants support/pr for actions it's already decided to take, and research funding that's allocated by a group of one's scientific peers. Even if there's some element of "corruption" in pandering to granting agencies, paying for PR cover under the guise of research is a lot worse.

GauntletWizard 11y ago

No. Those with an actual stake in the decisions deserve more of a voice in it than those who would only vote themselves a full stomach. The US is explicitly designed that those who are successful in the past (have money) have more of a voice than those who have failed (haven't money).

andrewstuart2 11y ago
Not having money is most certainly not a sign that you've failed. Having money is also most certainly not a sign that you've been successful. Generational wealth and poverty are real. By your measure, the current Kardashian generation would be considered among the best and brightest in America. Wealth is only a goal for some people, and I'd argue that the best and brightest are more likely to perceive that maybe a rat race to the top isn't the best use of their limited time on earth.
- GauntletWizard 11y ago
  Generational wealth is real. So is generational knowledge. My father taught me a large part of what I know. Why deny those who have inherent advantages from taking advantage of such? Oh, right, because you believe in a Harrison Bergeron-esque future in which everyone with talent is handicapped til they are at the level of the lowest retard. I wish you all deserved success with that.
  - dang 11y ago
    > Oh, right, because you believe in a Harrison Bergeron-esque future in which everyone with talent is handicapped til they are at the level of the lowest retard. This comment breaks the HN guidelines by being uncivil and unsubstantive. We ban accounts that do this. Please read the guidelines and follow them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
neolefty 11y ago
First, if success is defined by profit, then where do advocacy for justice, safety, and protecting the commons fit in? They are just as important for government to hear about as profit-generating business interests. Second, that argument sounds like Laissez-Faire economics, where those who succeed are enabled to succeed more. In practice, it leads to imbalances and winner-take-all problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez-faire#Critiques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez-faire#Critiques On the other hand, excessive regulation can suffocate innovation. So you need a balance. The debate comes when you try to figure out what the balance should be. In academia, that balance includes disclosure, peer-review, and openness. It's far from perfect, but we're working on it. But this article is mostly about government and policy that is informed by research, and the serious imbalances, information asymmetries, and lack of voice of non-business interests.
- GauntletWizard 11y ago
  Justice, Safety, and protecting the commons are perfectly satisfied by the interests of the wealthy. The absolute first thing that wealth wants is safety and order, and central to that is a well-functioning police force. Unless wealth has been entirely monopolized, that will involve a coalition of monied interests. We're not quite at the point of a private police force, though we're close, due to the raging ineffectiveness that BLM and similar movements are pushing for.
jbapple 11y ago
1. This comment does not at all address the actual article, which includes a decision in which individual investors and the mutual fund companies that sell them products both have "an actual stake", and yet only one of these has the organizational infrastructure to commission a study that aims to 2. . . . "vote[s] themselves a full stomach" by preventing regulation requiring them to act in the best interests of the people who they are giving financial advice to. 3. This comment then notes that the US is "explicitly designed" so that those with more money have more power. I suppose this historical note is meant to convince the reader that this is a good thing, but that seems pretty bizarre.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

tarekkurdy 11y ago

Yes.

onedev 11y ago
Thank you. Now let's discuss some solutions.
friendzis 11y ago
Simple yes is not enough - it is much more complex than the article explains. Private funding is just the tip of the iceberg - private companies want their own opinions written in scientific manner, with facts taken and hidden to support that opinion. Is it good or bad? It actually does not matter - it is that way. But this applies only for paid papers. There is a whole another category - paid research/engineering projects. Scientists doing the work expect to publish something. Yet the meat of the research has to remain hidden for the company investing to hold market advantage. Result? Technical babble in papers. And it is quite often hard as hell to find which pieces of the paper are not honest. Government funding application forms usually include a field labeled something like "Expected result/outcome". So you cannot just get funding without certainty of success in one form or another. Which basically results in funding directed to projects with some preliminary results. And those preliminary results are funded from another projects and so the cycle goes. This is very well illustrated in PhD Comics [1]. One of the core reasons behind all of this mess are funding gatekeepers: private companies know what they want and will pay for that particular output. Public funding is usually behind some Government Agency where the same set of people review funding applications and... "known to be well behaving" (delivering promised results) researchers are much more likely to get funded, see [1]. Either way, it is next to impossible to do what in my book is actual research - come up with a new idea and get funding to test whether it has any grounds at all. [1]: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd050611s.gif http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd050611s.gif Edit: fixed link

Fomite 11y ago

Disclaimer: I have done privately funded research. I'd say the answer is likely 'yes' - even for those who are trying to be conscious about it, there's a desire for things to work, to make people...well...happy. No one is going to be really excited to know their drug is shit. I've heard private industry researchers talk about this, even in companies that make an effort to shield research from finances - you don't want to let the team down. On the other hand, you know what else corrupts research? Wondering where the funding for your soft money lab is going to come from. How you're going to pay your grad students, technicians, etc. Research costs money, and the government has been providing less and less of it. The gap has to be made up somewhere.

dluan 11y ago
I'm going to argue that direct public funding is the best way, and by that I mean the historical analogy of direct patronage or crowdfunding research today (e.g. experiment.com). Today's 'big science' grant funding model is so far removed from the average citizen or constituent, that by the time they see or feel the impact, it's hardly recognizable anymore. Because it's behind paywalls, or is too technical, or locked in IP, or anti-collaboration. What we need to solve this problem is a direct connection with research and science. If you were motivated to go out and seek an answer for yourself, then perhaps you'd be less likely to lean on witnesses, testimony, or experts that you don't understand. The reality is that before the internet, people never really had that ability to go out and seek the truth for themselves. And I mean 'Truth' with a capital T, within significance, reproducible, and transparent. At least that's best thing short of everyone becoming a scientist, or doing science independently.
- ori_b 11y ago
  > Today's 'big science' grant funding model is so far removed from the average citizen or constituent, that by the time they see or feel the impact, it's hardly recognizable anymore. Because it's behind paywalls, or is too technical, or locked in IP, or anti-collaboration. Fundamental research often has no direct impact on the public. If it does, it's often 10 or 20 years down the line. Fundamentally research is, by it's nature, removed from the impact it has. Nobody knows what the final results will be. This isn't conducive to crowdfunding.

dluan 11y ago

I'd say this article is more along the lines "Is money corrupting politics?", especially as the outcomes of research in this context is usually are aimed at policy (or rather, justifying policy to the masses). If you want to tackle the shame that is using science as a populist tool for denialism, that you are allowed to conjure up an expert witness for any contrarian point of view or agenda, then you must tackle this problem head on. Front and center of this is the congressional ban on gun research. Probably the first step would be to change the way we present data and facts to policy-makers in a more sophisticated way, e.g. shorter review periods, or being able to democratically control those who sit on these committees. Or better, have more knowledgeable people there in the first place. Something something, series of tubes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes).

marcelsalathe 11y ago
Great points Denny. Btw, have you thought about soliciting gun research on experiment.com?
- dluan 11y ago
  https://experiment.com/projects/gun-control-research-project https://experiment.com/projects/gun-control-research-project
dekhn 11y ago
The series of tubes comment was completely correct. The internet is a series (well, a parallel) of tubes. They carry light, not tubes pneumatically pushed by air, but if you're a 300 year old senator, whatever analogy works.

dnautics 11y ago

Can publically funded research also be banned from indirect testimony? Isn't there also a conflict of interest if someone doing research on the federal dime is testifying as an expert to congress, which ostensibly is making decisions about future funding? presumably testimony that unabashedly is hearing about continued funding (e.g. progress reports) should be OK.

grayclhn 11y ago
Probably a decent rule of thumb is: does disclosing the source of funding make the research conclusion less credible? In TFA -- yes, to the point that it wasn't fully disclosed. For publicly funded research -- probably not.

rcthompson 11y ago

Well, they've certainly found an exception to the rule that "if the title is a question, the answer is no."

nicklaf 11y ago
The exception applies to this article too: http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/is-america-an-oligarchy http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/is-america-an-oli... Strangely enough, on the same general topic. Perhaps it's taboo to point out the obvious when the topic is the corrupting influence of money.

Fede_V 11y ago

Credible research institutions have no problems publishing white papers or research reports discussing their own research. For example, Microsoft Research is fully financed by Microsoft, but they have a sterling academic reputation which they've earned by doing top tier independent research. On the flipside, absolutely nobody will believe research coming out from Shell that says that climate change concerns are overblown, or by Philip Morris that dismisses the health harms of smoking. This is why when energy companies want to contest research funding, they attempt to buy out credible scientists and ask them to speak in their own name: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/feb/02/frontpagenews.climatechange http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/feb/02/frontpage...

kriro 11y ago

The article is only about a fraction of the issue, namely expert witness/report payments. The title is also a bit silly since money (mostly tax payer money in case of academics) is also what makes research possible in the first place. That being said I think it's really hard to be objective if you get funding from a private source with a certain agenda. There's some people who can pull it off and I have a lot of respect for them but for me it would simply be impossible to say with good consciousness that I wasn't influenced at all. However government money for research also has issues (I can only talk about how it works in Germany but it's similar in most of Europe). Namely I think the practice of research projects is somewhat questionable. You need to build a consortium of anywhere form 3-10ish partners and write a proposal and hope it gets accepted. This results in 2-4 year projects that are funded. Sounds decent enough at first glance but the devil is in the details. First of all it is not a blind process so I fully expect some institutions/individuals to get more or less autoaccepted due to name recognition alone. I can't say for sure but there's humans involved so anything else would surprise me. That unfortunately adds a political dimension. As a young academic you (and your professor) rely on a stream of funded projects to keep you employed (there's also non project-money jobs but these get rarer and rarer and are usually limited to 50% employment time) which means that your freedom of research is fairly limited (you can't really publish a paper that isn't related to the project and go to a conference for example) and more importantly there's a constant need to reacquire new funding. If I were to guess people spend anywhere form 20-40% of their time trying to get new projects and not working on the actual projects they have already secured. And of course this need for project money gives governments a good way of influencing what research is being conducted (which is somewhat opposed to the principle of freedom in research) as only things they offer will get funded. Lastly, it is surprisingly hard to do research as an individual with no institutional backing if one doesn't happen to have a good chunk of money set aside. Access to pay walled stuff (can be circumvented) and the need to travel to conferences (at least in CS) and depending on your field the need for costly equipment and access to test subjects. There's some developments in this regard (citizen research) and I hope it'll get easier because I think there's quite a few capable people who'd enjoy spending their free time on research that interests them and publish it when done.

innocentoldguy 11y ago

Of course it is! If the government, or some other entity, is going to give you a ton of grant money to prove, let's say, global warming, the options are to either "prove" it or watch your funding evaporate. What would you choose?

andygates 11y ago
That's not even wrong. Ton of money - lol nope. "To prove" rather than "to investigate" shows a PR-tainted lack of understanding the method. And if you publish rubbish, it's your reputation that's shot down when the papers showing how bad it is come round.

tracker1 11y ago

"Should congressional testimony and expert witnesses be banned and private funding of research prohibited? Eliminating private funding will leave research completely in public funding’s hands. It will not eliminate the bias; it will simply tilt it in the direction of the government." This is definitely a fact.. look how long it took for the lipid theory to be seriously challenged... years of research in support of what the government would fund. The food pyrimid is probably the best example of the results of this. As long as business and politics are so intertwined, putting government in charge isn't a viable solution in and of itself. It would be nice to see some efforts put towards pure/directed research... Unfortunately that's a hard sell to a lot of people who simply don't see the value.

tljr 11y ago

How can it not.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

This is a curious exception to Betteridge's Law. If the question is 'Is Money Corrupting <thing>?', then the answer is almost always yes.

amelius 11y ago
I guess the answer is always what you don't want it to be :)

SQL2219 11y ago

yes. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/central-figure-in-cdc-vac_b_494303.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/central-fi...

ThomPete 11y ago

I Danish there is an expression called "grundforskning" (fundamental research). It's research done to create new knowledge but without any specific application in mind. It's the foundation of future applied technologies just like quantum mechanics was for the laser. When the government stop putting money into "fundamental research" it hurts everyones ability to maybe come up with revolutionary solutions for problems in the future. Integral Research used to give their researchers a decade to find a way to make their research applicable I remember in the beginning of the zeroes it was down to a 3 years or something like that. The question we need to ask ourselves is not whether it's corrupting research but weather it's corrupting our future.

randomsearch 11y ago

Timely podcast from Stuff You Should Know on lobbying in the USA: http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/how-lobbying-works/ http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/how-lobbying-work...

mobiuscog 11y ago

I'd argue it's also corrupting the education system, as (definitely in the UK) Universities only really want to employ people who can 'assist' in being awarded research grants. Employ people who will research the correct topics in the correct way to provide the largest amounts of funding to... continue the cycle.

smanzer 11y ago

I remember being interviewed randomly on the street by local TV news for a "student's opinion" on Berkeley's Energy Biosciences Institute, which was funded by BP. This was during Deepwater Horizon, and they were despised as much here as anywhere. The research seemed pretty useful though, and it's great to get that kind of funding given how tight grants are these days. When the goal of the corporate funding is to build something, rather than to "impartially" assess policies on which the corporation has a well-defined self-interested position, then the process seems less prone to corruption. Still pretty controversial though now that they are pulling funding: http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2015-02-20/not-so-fast-uc-berkeley-biofuel-research-takes-hit-bp-oil http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2015-...

worik 11y ago

paywalled