Sheldon Krimsky’s latest book will
probably shock those readers who still think of scientific research conducted
at non-profit universities as a disinterested activity, exclusively motivated
by the pursuit of truth. Among those potentially astonished audiences, you should count most European scholars and, quite
likely, a vast majority of American citizens, to whom this book is mainly
addressed. It is not that they should care about how much money is being made
by an elite of biomedical scientists based at major American universities; the
shock comes at the discovery of how this financial incentive might bias their academic
behavior, preventing them from cooperating with other researchers (after all,
after all, we believe this to be the very purpose of university life) and, more
menacingly, influencing their decisions when participating in public committees
assembled to assess the efficacy of a drug or therapy, or enrolling us for one
of their clinical tests.

Krimsky gathers in eight chapters a
significant number of well-documented cases that provide ample evidence of the
many ways in which biomedical corporations have been conditioning university
research since the early 1980s. Funding in exchange for patents constitutes
probably the best-known issue, but the details of the contracts regulating this
transfer are not widely publicized. After a couple of introductory chapters
that set the tone of the analysis, the following two explore an array of
examples of these sort of agreements, all of which suggest that transforming
scientific knowledge into proprietary information constrains the free
circulation of ideas that should prevail in academia — according to our
classical lore. Indeed, the public discussion of our individual results is
still required by most philosophers as a pre-requisite for attaining the status
of scientific knowledge. Yet, as Krimsky discusses in chapter 5, most knowledge
transfer agreements between universities and corporations restrict access to
these results or impose delays on their publication.

Corporate influence might also be felt in
Federal advisory boards, in which leading scientists are invited to participate
in their capacity as disinterested experts. Yet, as the evidence compiled in
chapters 6-9 attests, they might also be directly funded in various ways by
biomedical companies whose interest may be put
at stake in those commissions. It is often difficult to recruit qualified
scientists that are not listed in the consultive boards of one or another
corporation, receive from them personal grants or donations for their
laboratories or fall under any of the clauses of the federal regulations designed
to prevent conflicts of interests within those committees. It might also happen
that the scientist is also the entrepreneur, having his own financial interest
in the success of the experiments he is conducting. To discount this possible
source of bias, it is not unreasonable to expect this piece of information to
be disclosed to the readers of his papers — and to the patients on which he
might be testing his results. Again, Krimsky shows that it is becoming
increasingly difficult for journals and hospitals alike to enforce transparency
clauses of this sort.

The final two chapters of this book explore
alternative patterns of behavior in academia that would preserve the ideal of
universities as the locus of research in the public interest. Krimsky claims
that the evidence presented calls for an open debate on the role of American
universities, on the basis of which an adequate regulation of their interaction
with the corporate world would hopefully emerge. Krimsky’s choice, though not
thoroughly articulated in his book for the sake of informativeness, would be
quite drastic: "by accepting the premise that conflicts of interest in
universities must be subtly managed, rather than prohibited or prevented,
nothing less that the public interest function of the American academic
enterprise is at stake" (p. 230).

The book is certainly a very readable starting point
to open a debate that should not be postponed in the United States, and might
help European audiences to look ahead to what it is likely to be a not so
distant future. It might be argued, however, that this debate could also
benefit from a more ample use of the different approaches that have been
developed among science scholars in the last twenty years. Some of them show,
for instance, that various interests other than truth have been pervasive in
science throughout its entire history. Krimsky assumes an ideal of
scientificity that, attractive as it may be, might have been never fully
realized. However, the problems he is raising are so serious that it is worth
discussing whether it might still help us.

© 2005 David Teira Serrano

David Teira Serrano, Ph.D., University
of Salamanca

Categories: Ethics