Scientific research, like farming, manufacturing, or banking, is a business.
Science, like any other business, involves investments of money, property, human resources, facilities, and capital.
Private industry funds the majority of R & D conducted around the world.
In the US, 71% of R & D funding comes from industry, followed by government (21%) and private foundations (4%).
Scientists, sponsors, and institutions usually have financial interests related to the outcome of research.
- Scientists receive salary support for their work and may have intellectual property rights, such as patents, related to their research.
- They may also own stock in companies that fund their research or have relationships, such as consulting agreements, with those companies.
Companies that sponsor research have an interest in producing research results that support the development and marketing of their products or services.
- Institutions receive funding through contracts or grants with research sponsors and may also own stock in companies that fund research.
- Institutions often have collaboration agreements with companies and receive gifts from companies.
- Institutions may also own intellectual property related to research.
Although most of the debate about financial interests in research has focused on ownership of stock or intellectual property or relationships with private research sponsors, it is important to realize that salary support can also have a significant impact on scientific behavior.
Decisions concerning hiring, tenure, and promotion made by academic institutions are usually based on a scientist’s ability to publish, develop intellectual property, and obtain grants or research contracts.
Many institutions require scientists to support their salaries by obtaining contracts or grants and have come to depend on the indirect income provided by grants or contracts to cover operating expenses.
Some scientists, such as post-doctoral fellows, are supported by “soft money,” which means that their salaries are supported entirely by grants or contracts. If these contracts or grants are not renewed, these scientists may lose their jobs.
Many scientists and scholars are concerned that financial interests can threaten the scientific community’s adherence to methodological and ethical norms, such as honesty, objectivity, openness, social responsibility, and protection of research subjects.
Scientists who have financial interests related to their work may distort their research to produce desired results, fail to publish or share data or methods appropriately, or violate ethical or legal rules.
Research sponsors may manipulate study designs or data analysis and interpretation to produce outcomes that favor their interests, or suppress unfavorable data and results.
Institutions may sign contracts that allow private companies to prevent academic scientists from publishing data or results or they may accept gifts that give industry donors some control over research or the curriculum.
Institutional officials may look the other way when well-funded scientists are accused of misconduct, or they may place pressure on oversight committees to approve lucrative studies.
There are many well-known cases in which financial interests have adversely impacted scientific integrity.
- For example, in the early 2000s, scientists funded by the pharmaceutical company Merck did not publish data showing that its drug Vioxx increased the risk of heart attacks and strokes, and several pharmaceutical companies failed to publish data showing that their anti-depressant drugs increase the risk of suicide in adolescents.
- In the 1990s, tobacco companies conducted secret research on the addictive properties of nicotine while claiming that cigarettes are not addictive.
- In 1995, a pharmaceutical company forced the University of California to withdraw a paper accepted by the New England Journal of Medicine showing that its thyroid medication is not superior to several generic medications .
- In 1999, Jesse Gelsinger died from a severe immune reaction to an adenovirus vector he received in a Phase I gene therapy trial in which the investigator and the institution had significant financial interests (stock and patents) that were not properly disclosed during the consent process. Gelsinger also was not properly informed about the risks of the treatment identified by previous animal studies.
- In 2005, University of Vermont researcher Eric Poehlman admitted to fabricating and falsifying data over a ten-year period on 15 federal grants worth $2.9 million. Poehlman, who served a year and a day in federal prison and was fined $196,000, manipulated data because he felt pressure to maintain grant funding to support himself and his research staff.
Numerous empirical studies have highlighted potential funding biases by demonstrating statistically significant associations between private sponsorship and research outcomes.
For example, a study of research on calcium channel blocking drugs found that 96% of authors who published studies reporting outcomes favorable to the use of calcium channel blockers had financial relationships with corporate sponsors.
A study of cardiovascular clinical trials found that publications that disclosed industry funding were more likely to report positive findings than those not funded by industry.
Three systematic reviews of over 40 publications examining the relationship between sources of funding and research outcomes found that studies with industry funding were more likely to report results that favored the company’s products than studies with independent sources of funding.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4278468/
