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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4201

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Krimsky S, Ennis JG, Weissman R.
Academic-corporate ties in biotechnology: a quantitative study.
Sci Technol Human Values 1991 Sum; 16:(3):275-87


Abstract:

The rapid commercialization of applied genetics in the mid-1970s, accompanied by a sudden rise in academic-corporate partnerships, raised questions about the impacts these linkages have had on the social and professional norms of scientists. The extent and pattern of faculty invovlement in commercialization of biological research is largely an unexplored area. This article provides a quantitative assessment of the linkages between biology faculty in American universities and the newly formed biotechnology industry. The results of this study, covering the period 1985-88, show that academic scientists reponded en masse to participating in the commercialization of genetics research by establishing formal associations with many of the new biotechnology companies. A data base consisting of 889 U.S. and Canadian biotechnology companies and 832 scientists who had formal ties to them was developed over a four-year period. The patterns of academic-corporate linkages are revealed by institution. Three universities with the most commercially active faculty are Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. Of the 359 biomedical scientists and geneticists who were members of the National Academy of Sciences (in 1988), at minimum, 37% had formal ties with the biotechnology industry.

Keywords:
*analytic survey/biotechnology/corporate funding/United States/Canada/Harvard/Stanford/Massachussets Institute of Technology/drug company sponsored research/relationship between researchers, academic institutions and industry/ETHICAL ISSUES IN PROMOTION: LINKS BETWEEN HEALTH PROFESSIONALS AND INDUSTRY/SPONSORSHIP: RESEARCH Biology Biomedical Research* Biomedical Technology Conflict of Interest DNA, Recombinant Economics* Entrepreneurship* Financial Support* Genetics Humans Industry* Peer Review Research* Research Personnel* Science Statistics United States Universities*

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909