In recent years there have been a number of highly visible attacks on American science, everything from the fundamentalist assault on evolution to the Bush administration’s strong-arming of government scientists. But for many people who pay close attention to research and development (R&D), the biggest threat to science has been quietly occurring under the radar, even though it may be changing the very foundation of American innovation. The threat is money—specifically, the decline of government support for science and the growing dominance of private spending over American research.
The trend is undeniable. In 1965, the federal government financed more than 60 percent of all R&D in the United States. By 2006, the balance had flipped, with 65 percent of R&D in this country being funded by private interests. According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, several of the nation’s science-driven agencies—the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior, and NASA—have been losing funding, leading to more “outsourcing” of what were once governmental science functions. The EPA, for example, recently began conducting the first nationwide study on the air quality effects of large-scale animal production. Livestock producers, not taxpayers, are slated to pay for the study. “The government is clearly increasing its reliance on industry and forming ‘joint ventures’ to accomplish research that it is unable to afford on its own anymore,” says Merrill Goozner, a program director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group.
Research universities, too, are rapidly privatizing. Both public and private institutions now receive a shrinking portion of their overall funding from government sources. They are looking instead to private industry and other commercial activities to enhance their funding. Last summer, an 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 included stock options, consulting fees, and patents.
Is all this truly harmful to science? Some experts argue that corporate support is actually beneficial because it provides enhanced funding for R&D, speeds the transfer of new knowledge to industry, and boosts economic growth. “It isn’t enough to create new knowledge,” says Richard Zare, a professor of chemistry at Stanford University. “You need to transfer that knowledge for the betterment of society. That’s why I don’t want to set up this conflict of interest problem to such a heightened level of hysteria whereby you can’t get universities cooperating with industry.”
Even many industry leaders worry that the current mix of private and public funding is out of balance, however. In 2005, a panel of National Academies (the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine) that included both industry and academic members (including Zare) concluded that corporate R&D “cannot and should not replace federal R&D.” Norman Augustine, the panel’s chairman and a former CEO at Lockheed Martin, noted that market pressures have compelled industry to put nearly all its investment into applied research, not the riskier basic science that drives innovation 10 to 15 years out.
