CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts -- Private industry's growing involvement in scientific research is delaying and, in some cases, halting critical scientific advances.
That was the consensus Monday at a symposium of scientists, university administrators, and researchers taking place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus. The one-day Secrecy in Science conference was co-hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and MIT.
Twenty years after the Bayh-Dole Act gave businesses the economic incentive to fund university research -- and gave universities the motivation to attract private dollars -- the research community is changing from a culture of open inquiry into a culture of secrecy driven by profit motives.
"The good news is that US industry wants to speed innovation by sponsoring research," said former CIA director John Deutch, now a professor at MIT. "The bad news is that that research is excellent, and useful, and valuable to them."
That is just part of the bad news, however. The increasingly close relationship between the market and academia has corporations delaying the publication of research, causing the scientific community to lose immediate access to critical research.
Critics dread the stifling impact on the free and open exchange of information in the fields of health, biotechnology, and other sciences.
"My fear is that the money will go to the universities with the lowest standards, which is a race to the ethical bottom," said Drummond Rennie, adjunct professor of medicine at the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California at San Francisco.
Stories of careers threatened by industry-funded research framed a prominent moral backdrop to Monday's proceedings.
In 1997, an associate professor of medicine at Brown University, Dr. David Kern, signed on with Microfibres of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to study mysterious lung ailments among the textile manufacturer's employees.
When Kern announced plans to publish his discovery of a new lung disease, the company threatened to sue, citing his confidentiality agreement with the company. Kern pressed on and eventually published his findings about a previously unrecognized form of occupational lung disease.
Brown criticized Kern for violating the confidentiality agreement and the university failed to support him in his legal fight with Microfibres, although it concluded that his academic freedom had been violated. Kern lost his post at Brown, and he was fired from the Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island.
Considered a hero among many in the occupational health research community, Kern is still mulling his future options. But he is certain about one thing: "I'm disappointed by the [university] community. For the most part, there was cowardice."
Kern's case is not unique.
"I can't imagine that, for every two or three [cases of commercial secrecy stifling scientific findings] you hear about, there aren't twenty more," Dr. Nancy Olivieri said.
Olivieri found herself in a similar situation when she insisted on going public with concerns raised by her privately funded research into a new drug for Canadian pharmaceutical company Apotex.
Universities are too often led by administrators who bend to financial pressure and allow faculty to enter unethical industry relationships, she said. "They're afraid people will go elsewhere," so they approve too many ethically threatening industry-researcher relationships.
Dr. Alan Hartford, a clinical research fellow and residential physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, noticed an unexpected correlation in his 1995 survey of industry relationships with biotechnology and biomedical researchers.
Of 2,052 survey respondents, 64 percent had some sort of industry relationship. The relationships ranged from funding for research to involvement with the management of startup ventures. Twenty-five percent received direct funding.
Most researchers were motivated to accept industry contracts less by the money itself, and more because they felt university decisions to grant pay increases and tenure were tied to research funding. Hartford said it indicates an institutional problem.
"This [relationship between industry and university research] can change attitudes, it can change behaviors, it can change the science that's being done," Hartford concluded.
The goal of the MIT symposium is to begin mapping changes in universities' and researchers' behavior that can turn back the effects of such relationships.
"There is a tendency to look for the Darth Vader: 'Who can we blame for this problem?'" said panelist Martin Michaelson, an attorney.
His own experience reveals a university environment in which administrators frequently are blind to the nature of the research relationships at their own institutions.
"It's difficult establishing the cooperation of faculty who are being seduced by venture capital," Michaelson said.
Peter Gosselin, national economics correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, recommended that while mapping a path out of this current predicament, the research community must not underestimate the power of the underlying factors.
"The very market defines ownership [of research findings]... and profits from it as much as possible," he said. "The incentives that the market structure builds in are astoundingly seductive."
Panelist Lita Nelsen, who runs the technology licensing office at MIT, said university administrators must get more involved in such contracts.
While most of the "elite" universities of the country are holding their ground and not making ethically questionable research agreements with industry, Nelsen said many are "afflicted with [industry's threat]: 'If you don't do it, we'll go to the others.'"
She said MIT is proof that industry will still fund research when universities lay the ground rules on the free exchange of company-funded research. MIT has secured over $80 million in company funding because, she said, "we were able to explain to industry that you want us because we're different."
In the past 15 years, MIT's industry funding of scientific research has risen from 5 percent to nearly 25 percent.
