Money in Science

John Tierney has a piece in the Times today pooh poohing people who are concerned about the role of corporate money science: Corporate Backing for Research? Get Over It

He may well be right to say

Conflict-of-interest accusations have become the simplest strategy for avoiding a substantive debate. The growing obsession with following the money too often leads to nothing but cheap ad hominem attacks.

but I think that he is overly dismissive of attempts to ensure that people disclose possible conflicts of interest:

The new fetish for disclosing “conflicts” has led some of the best medical researchers to shun drug company money altogether — not because they think it leads to bad research, but because they are tired of that fact being highlighted every time they are identified in a news story, as if that were the most important thing to know about their work.

Corporate research has multiple purposes. Internal research helps companies develop and test products, of course, but research that gets released externally serves different roles:

• First, research released in public legitimizes the corporation as a place to do research and helps to attract smart people. As best I can tell, this is why Microsoft Research set up their Theory Group. Originally it was a handful of mathematicians trying to prove that P &neq; NP via some rather esoteric methods. The group's primary contribution to Microsoft was press releases and papers - in effect, they were a very expensive hood ornament that let people doing more practical things at MSR say, "I work with a Fields Medalist."
• Second, public research serves as a form of compensation for employees - it lets them build their reputations in their professional communities, which is useful for future opportunities. I've seen an econ paper that estimated that researchers in pharma who were able to publish were paid ~20% less than those whose research was all secret, so publishing really does appear to matter in a quantifiable way (alas, I have no idea where the reference is).

Both of these goals have to be balanced with companies' need to protect intellectual property, preserve their brand, and so on - there are limits on what one can publish. Some companies will value the HR benefits more highly than the need for secrecy / brand preservation, so employees will be able to publish fairly freely; others will put a greater premium on secrecy and image control, and employees' work will be highly filtered. Filtering need not come from management, either. Promotion in industry is not a function of the weight of your publications, and there will simply be some kinds of work that are not worth one's time to publish because it won't do one's career much good.

The point: while it may well be true that , "a team of academic researchers (not financed by industry) analyzed dozens of large-scale clinical trials in previous decades and reported that industry-sponsored ones met significantly higher standards than the nonindustry ones," it is possible that subtle (and in some cases not-so-subtle) biases can arise from the various forms of filtering. The work in industry may be of excellent quality, but some kinds of results may never see the light of day - for example, negative results from some kinds of clinical trials.

I don't mean to demonize industry here - I think that all institutions and funders create incentive structures that favor some kinds of work over others. The point is that disclosure of funding sources and interests is important because it provides readers with valuable context and insights into what kinds of questions may not have been asked.