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Private Interests Count Too

Commentary on “Science, Democracy, and the Right to Research”

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Abstract

Along with concerns about the deleterious effects of politically driven government intervention on science are the intrusion of private sector interests into the conduct of research and the reporting of its results. Scientists are generally unprepared for the challenges posed by private interests seeking to advance their economic, political, or ideological agendas. They must educate and prepare themselves for assaults on scientific freedom, not because it is a legal right, but rather because social progress depends on it.

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Notes

  1. The literature on a “right to research” is overwhelmingly produced by lawyers and legal scholars, not scientists or engineers.

  2. “Because the texture and boundaries of scientific freedom and responsibility resist simple definition, the position of scientists needs to be reassessed from time to time in the context of changing ethical predicaments” (AAAS Committee 1975, p. v).

  3. Historian of science Loren Graham wrote in 1978 that “This autonomy of science should be defended not as a privilege for an elite, nor as an absolute right, but as a need of society itself. The conclusion will be, then, that some aspects of science and technology should be controlled for the same reason that other aspects should not be: namely, it is better for society that way, ….” (Graham 1978, p. 2).

  4. Perhaps a better and more recent example is the enactment of the Researcher Protection Act of 2008 in California. In that case, the California university system led the charge in efforts to pass legislation that would increase law enforcement’s tools to protect academic researchers and their families from intimidation and violence by anti-animal research extremists (Guess 2008).

  5. This is what Brown and Guston (2009) refer to as “the expansion of conflict.”

  6. Additional examples are available at the website of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE 2007) and in the article by Debra Parrish (2002), “U.S. Legal Principles and Confidentiality of the Peer Review Process.”

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Correspondence to Mark S. Frankel.

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Frankel, M.S. Private Interests Count Too. Sci Eng Ethics 15, 367–373 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-009-9137-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-009-9137-2

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