Privatising technology

Is the privatisation of science research all that unadvisable? Or is it the way to go for the future?

As the bond-market crisis around the Eurozone turmoil worsened, the EU crafted a plan in early 2011 to tackle issues with the assistance of private creditors starting 2013. Because the threat this poses to persistently weakening employment scenarios in the fringe nations of the union significantly overwhelms every other consideration, one of the world’s most exotic scientific experiments took a hit, too.

The awesome Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a mammoth machine built to smash subatomic particles together at speeds approaching that of light, first faced delays in its construction. Consequently, the deadline of its completion was pushed from mid-2005 to late-2007. In 2008, proposed upgrades to the device had to be scrapped after the allowances for CERN, the European agency for nuclear research, were reduced by EUR 465 million.

Similarly, with the deadline for the US debt crisis looming large during the last week of July, budding web-based organizations like Zynga and LinkedIn took a big hit when the proposed value of their initial public offering was slashed by more than 20%. However, like in the previous example, a scientific research establishment was pushed to bankruptcy after budget cuts left it lifeless: the SETI Institute.

Surprisingly, both establishments are in the pink of health today, thanks to private investors jumping in on the opportunity to secure their individual research interests. SETI raised over $200,000 in private donations and the LHC set in place the LHC@home grid to access the computing power of home PCs. Science and technology are, after all, good investment options (especially against the US dollar), and the involvement of market-driven forces in the proliferation of research organizations can no longer be considered as unadvisable.

Just as the onus of keeping science clean, fair and accurate has lay with the faith in the tradition of asking questions, so also must the faithful embrace this new direction that science seems intent upon taking. The exclusion of private interests or the inclusion of public interests has never mattered as much as the attitudes toward peer reviewing and reasonable scepticism have.

Says Mariette DiChristina, editor-in-chief of Scientific American: “Most scientists finance their laboratories by applying to government agencies and private foundations for grants. The process has become a major time sink. Funding agencies are well aware of these woes and have responded by tweaking the review process and the size of grants. That is not enough. They need to be experimenting more aggressively to find ways to fix the system.”

The situation is no better in Europe. In 2006, when British universities for the first time in over 30 years enjoyed an increase in government funding, the minister for higher education, Bill Rammell, said, “I want to see our institutions increase their ability to tap into private donations, like universities in other countries. The new funding we are providing should help provide the spur for more private donations.”

In 2007, a U.S. government study found that university faculty members spend about 40% of their research time trying to obtain approval from government agencies for the initiation of projects. The approach taken by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the largest private supporter of medical research in the U.S, on the other hand, involves the selection of people instead of projects for benefaction. It has selected some 330 researchers with a demonstrated track record of success, as well as 50 up-and-coming young scientists, and annually distributes about $500 million among them with a minimum of red tape.

Richard Baker, the director general of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, continues to be pessimistic about the influence of companies even though he conceded the inevitability of spending cuts to the tune of 25% (as of 2010) simply asking for companies to step in.

Giving the example of monoclonal bodies, he said, “They were mapped out as possible therapies in 1975 in a laboratory in Cambridge, but it was only in the late 1990s and this century that they become substantial medicines. The companies would not have done that very basic research that the laboratory in Cambridge did.”

As the exploitation of resources slowly becomes a necessary practice even amongst those in pursuit of purely scientific goals, the role of corporate social responsibility becomes accentuated. As Matthew Wald of the New York Times writes, “Six of the projects [picked up for federal grants in 2011] have made enough progress to attract $108 million in private venture capital financing. This is a sign of the Obama administration emphasizing the early signs of success while seeking to persuade a sometimes skeptical Congress to approve more money for clean energy innovation.”

The scientific community at this juncture also has its own responsibility. It has to direct the future of science not just through its choices but also by forcing companies to recognize that their fiscal securities are tied in with their research goals.