© Lloyd

 

Scientific fraud and the power structure of science

Brian Martin

http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/92prom.html

[Excerpts]

[B]iased viewpoints [are tolerated in science], including those linked to powerful vested interests. Many scientists are employed by or receive research funds from companies or government bodies, and both expect and are expected to come up only with results useful to those bodies. Scientists receiving money from chemical companies to study pesticides seldom draw attention to the limitations or dangers of pesticides: they simply do studies within a framework which assumes that using pesticides is the appropriate thing to do. Physicists working on nuclear weapons design do not stray outside their narrow task. Engineers employed by automobile companies do not propose studies looking for safety problems or alternatives to the car [15].

It could be said that the viewpoints of most scientists are not so much biased as limited: they are willing to do narrow research work whose context is set by the powerful patrons of science. The bias comes from the context, not from the conscious intent of the scientist. In any case, this sort of bias is standard practice, or at worst tolerated. Researchers who are funded by the tobacco industry to study the health effects of cigarettes may be frowned upon, but they are not drummed out of science for being corrupt.

The flip side of bias built into the structure of science is suppression of dissent. The few scientists who speak out against dominant interests — such as against pesticides, nuclear power or automobile design — often come under severe attack. They may have their reputations smeared, be demoted, be transferred, have their publications blocked, be dismissed, or be blacklisted [16].

It can be argued that there is bias in all scientific research. Whether bias is seen as a problem depends on what the bias is. Biases that are no threat to powerful interests are treated as standard or tolerated. Biases that do threaten powerful interests are, often enough, attacked with full fury.

In order to put the allegations of fraud into perspective, it is necessary to understand this point that science as it really happens contains a host of potentially dubious practices, many of which are considered standard and many others widely tolerated. In order to understand why, it is useful to look at the dominant interests served by science.

[] The semi-bureaucratic organisation of scientific research is a crucial factor in this process of shaping scientific goals. A relatively small number of scientists and bureaucrats make the crucial decisions about research: setting up and shutting down research programmes, making key appointments, editing journals, allocating grants, awarding prizes. This group can be called the political scientific elite [18]. They have the dominant influence on priorities within science. More than most other scientists, they have regular interactions with equivalent elites within government and industry, and usually share the same basic concerns.

[] The usual remedies proposed for scientific fraud are codes of ethics and imposition of penalties for violators. From the perspective presented here, these approaches are largely useless, because they focus only on a narrow subset of problems with scientific practice and leave unchanged the power structures which are centrally important in causing the problems.

[] Structural changes that would affect the level of misrepresentation and bias in science include reducing the power of scientific elites, untying the link between quantity of publication and career advancement and reducing the impact of government and industry funding on science. Specific examples include flat salary structures and anonymous publication. In this paper, it is impossible to deal with the ramifications of such drastic changes, not to mention strategies to bring them about. Suffice it to say that scientific fraud, whether defined as usual in narrow terms or broadly conceived as a range of types of misrepresentation and bias, cannot be seriously affected by tinkering with a few policies. Fraud is an integral part of the way science is organised today. It is safe to predict that official concern about fraud will continue to be triggered mainly by bad publicity rather than by fearless and dispassionate investigations into systemic problems in the practice of science.