Inside Higher Ed ran a story after the 2010 Gulf oil spill that faculty members have been approached to serve as consultants to BP. See “Oil Debate Spills into Academe.”
A faculty member at the University of Southern Mississippi who was approached by BP expressed concerns about the public appearances:
“We’re all employees of the state of Mississippi, and none of us really felt comfortable about testifying on the other side — even if what we said was scientifically accurate,” Griffit says.
There’s the challenge–faculty concerned about expressing scientifically accurate findings if those findings would help an argument that ran against the position taken by the state government. Well, that opens up room to contemplate the nature of legal justice relative to poetic justice. But it also suggests something about the nature of scientific accuracy and the use of authorities to restate it. For instance, some things might be scientifically accurate and expressed, while other things may also be scientifically accurate and work against the first things, and yet be suppressed. The truth, but not the whole truth, as it were. The whole truth might well be that science presents conflicting, accurate statements, and is not–as a matter of science–able to resolve those conflicts. That, too, raises strange thoughts about the use of science in court.
It’s pretty typical in consulting agreements that data rights, publication, and IP can be locked up for the consultant’s employer. If funding goes through a university’s sponsored research program, however, then a sponsor might be allowed pre-publication review (but not the right to veto publication). In theory, then, any data gathered in the sponsored research could be made publicly available. But in practice, for whatever reasons, a faculty member might choose not to publish data even when publishing findings. In other words, typical university sponsored research agreements do not force faculty to publish their data. Some scientific journals require the deposit of data. But if one avoids those journals, the data can remain sequestered. And that brings us right back to how a faculty scientist might influence legal proceedings simply by declining to make data available–or choosing not to collect data that might support–with scientific accuracy–a position that the faculty scientist does not wish to succeed. You see the conflict of interest, no? It’s not between personal gain and public benefit, but between doing science and exploiting a position of scientific trust to influence a result based on something other than science–appeasing a sponsor or employer, fitting in with the political interests of colleagues or activists.
Here’s Chris D’Elia, LSU dean of the School of Coast and the Environment, talking about which side of the dispute over responsibility and extent of damage a faculty scientist might work on:
“You’re working for a side with a financial interest [either way],” he says. “The federal government is trying to maximize the damage assessment for obvious reasons, and the oil companies are trying to minimize it.”
“But there’s no doubt about it,” he adds. “You’re much more on the White Knight side if you’re with the feds, the aggrieved party.”
D’Elia says his preference would be for the federal government to provide a pool of money to scientists for the purposes of studying the spill’s impact. Absent that, research becomes part of a legal process — not necessarily a scientific one, D’Elia says.
The issue at the core is whether scientific practice can withstand the mercenary and personal pressures to be on one side or another of such a bi-polar issue. Accurate science, after all, might not support either side–and might just have to admit “we really don’t know.” Add in a federal or university or company claim to IP developed in sponsored, mission-directed research, and it’s pretty clear there is no neutral ground available–at least not without a lot of candor, respect, and discipline. It’s like being a referee in a World Cup match. If the referee takes sides, then it’s all up. And if there are no referees, what keeps the match civil and within the rules?
Regardless of who is paying–the feds or BP–it comes down to a huge potential for buying off the science, whether by what is collected, what is chosen to be presented, the nature of the analysis, and the suppression of data that would lessen the impression of certainty in whatever scientific claims are to be made. Taking money from a sponsor with a legal or political agenda makes things mercenary. That’s the case, say, with the problem with “tobacco money.” But it is also just as much a problem with “federal money.” One has to be really vigilant. It’s all too easy to game the data, the experimental set up, the interpretation of results. Dan Ariely points to research that suggests that even if someone with a conflict of interest discloses that conflict, the outcomes can end up being more biased–people tend to underestimate the effect of the disclosed bias on the findings and recommendations. (See The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, Chapter 3 “Blinded by Our Own Motivations”).
More concern is that once the buying spree is done and there are government-sponsored faculty scientists and oil company-consulting faculty scientists, then what faculty researchers are left with a voice in the matter? Where are the scientists focused on science, not just on amassing and quantifying “data”? Science doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but also science is only as good as the candor with which it is done. That is, one can go through the motions of actions we would attribute to scientists–making observations, proposing hypotheses, collecting data, running analyses, using technical language, and relying on academic credentials–and it can still not be science.
In Against Method–a work that isn’t intended to be even handed about things–Paul Feyerabend argues that the separation of science and state is more vital than the separation of church and state. Yet in the United States at least, government funding has come to dominate many areas of science, technology, and this unnamed activity that has many of the motions of science, but isn’t. We have created a sort of golem science–a kind of robotic use of science that necessarily must be presented to please government funders of science. It may be such mercenary work serves a purpose. Clearly it serves a master. It may even seek to stand up to that master and present displeasing findings from time to time–and that too may be a good thing, or not. But if we can’t tell–if mercenary science is just as good as any other form of science–then we need to ensure that mercenary science isn’t the only science. And perhaps in key areas of policy, mercenary science–even federally funded mercenary science–should not even be the dominant form of science.