For many in the world of research and development, the biggest threat to science has been the growing dominance of private spending over research
 
The corporate world, a cut-throat profit-driven entity that it is, doesn’t take long to make use of advancement in any arena of human activity to go for the kill; science being no different. There is nothing wrong with it per se, but there are always two sides to a coin.

We have seen in recent times the rebirth of the Bayes’s Theorem that deals with the issue of updating existing beliefs on the basis of prior evidence. After spending two centuries in the wilderness, it is now increasingly recognised as the most reliable way of extracting insights from a morass of complex data. Apart from acceptance in the scientific community, the Theorem has been lapped up by the corporate world where major corporations now rely on it to make sense of their own sales and marketing data. It allows them, for example, to target mail-shots far more accurately to minimise the chance of producing junk mail that has the potential to offend the uninterested recipients. A number of multinationals around the world use Baysian-inspired data management software that was created by experts working for Dr Michael Lynch who, in the late 1990s, became Britain’s first dollar billionaire to sell these products.

Much the same has been the case with the Butterfly Effect and Chaos. If they are seen lurking in things that appear to be totally random, then it may help in giving them some semblance of regularity which, in turn, helps in predicting the future. Given the potential for making fortunes, much effort has been put since the 1990s into finding evidence for Chaos in economic and financial data. On the face of it, their dependence on a host of different factors would mean that the ‘random’ behaviour of, say, gross national product or currency exchange rates really is actually chaotic — and thus potentially predictable.

There has not been immediate success on this count. Studies by Dr Paul Ormerod of a London-based economic consultancy have shown that economic data appear to be more random than chaotic — which would at least explain the notorious unreliability of economic forecasts. Similarly, gloomy conclusions have been reached about financial data such as exchange rates. Even so, some financial institutions are known to use mathematicians to spot bursts of predictability in financial markets — and there are many who believe that if these corporate mathematicians are having success using the chaos theory, they are not saying for fear of alerting their rivals.

So far so good. No one can argue with this approach, which, if anything, is enterprising. The other side of the coin, however, is not as enterprising for it directly hurts the public interest side of scientific research, which is otherwise known for its commitment to independence and objectivity. For many in the world of research and development, the biggest threat to science has been the growing dominance of private spending over research.

A recent investigation by the San Jose Mercury News found that one-third of Stanford University’s medical school administrators and department heads now have reported financial conflicts of interest related to their own research. These include stock options, consulting fees and patents.

In the words of Jane Henney, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, ‘it is getting much more difficult to get that pure person with no conflicts at all … The question becomes both one of disclosure and how much of a conflict you can have and still be seen as an objective and knowledgeable reviewer of information.’

Besides, more than half the scientists at the US Fish and Wildlife Service who responded to a survey conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists in 2005 agreed that ‘commercial interests have inappropriately induced the reversal or withdrawal of scientific conclusions or decisions.’

Though the malaise runs across the scientific spectrum — from environment and livestock to astrology and technology — it is nowhere more rampant than in medical research. The needs — commercial needs — of industry are increasingly becoming paramount, turning science into a contested terrain where facts happen to be contingent on who is funding the research. The tendency in the drug industry to suppress negative research data is beyond doubt.

This represents the ugly side of scientific research. But, then, scientists in their basic capacities are human beings and are bound to have all the shortcomings and inadequacies that have defined man’s existence on the planet. Right?
 
Postscript: At the time of embarking on this journey, I had hoped to keep it going for a while. But when the mood takes a swing, the moodies find themselves helpless. The mood has swung, and the Moody has moved on. Where? Only the mood will decide!
 
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