<p>""It doesn’t even occur to them that, well, maybe these cancers…</p>
<p>Such thinking might indict oil and chemical companies, he said. Like Koch Industries, for example. In a poll on the website “Who are the 1%?” from the lefty Brave New Foundation, the Koch Brothers are running No. 2, second only to Fox News boss Rupert Murdoch. (See this New Yorker story and this NNB post for the Koch’s response to the charge that their operations harm the environment.)</p>
<p>Researchers like King who support the protesters at Occupy Boston say science is losing out as more of the nation’s wealth is channeled into the hand of the elite. Academic scientists are scrambling for private sponsors to survive in an era of NIH austerity budgets. That means more of the scientific agenda will be profit-driven and in the private domain."</p>
<p>“It doesn’t even occur to them that, well, maybe these cancers are due to exposure to a class of carcinogens that are not nutritional, but are chemical and if you identify them, you could cut down the incidence of the disease,” King says</p>
<p>This is not really a new phenomenon. Corporations have been financing research at universities for a long time. This is part of the UC Davis Movement. </p>
<p>"Is it really any surprise that the UC administrative response to the Occupy movement has been hysterical and violent? They have a lot of dirty laundry related to their public-private partnerships with large corporations as well as with their student loan deals with major banks, most of it unexamined so far. The protesters will sooner or later shine a spotlight on those issues, and that’s not what the UC administration wants to see.</p>
<p>UC President Yudof is a major proponent of this corporate approach - and the UC Regents have close ties to major banks that profit off federally guaranteed student loans. An investigation into deals that benefit banks and school executives, but which hurt students, could easily lead to major fines or criminal prosecution, depending on what was uncovered. This is a nationwide problem, too - student loan debt is over $1 trillion and is crippling the economic futures of hundreds of thousands of young people.</p>
<p>The corporate campus agenda is also corrupting basic research - UC Davis, for example, owns the patent for rGBH milk (bovine growth hormone, recombinant), licensed to Monsanto - the administration expects to pull in $100 million from sales - but what if some researcher discovers the stuff is bad for your health (it probably is)? That researcher will not have a future in the UC system, that’s for sure." NYT</p>
<p>A huge violation of First Amendment Rights, as well.</p>
<p>So… the authors of that piece are saying that nothing remotely beneficial to the society will ever come out of the industry-sponsored research? Like falsification of data, sabotage, lies, etc. never happen in purely academic environment? I do not need to go far to find a few examples. Google “retraction watch blog” - it is scary what gets published. Or here is another example of academic “research integrity”:</p>
<p>Not trying to defend the researchers who fudged up/retracted their data after being harrassed by “corporate sponsors”, just trying to present a balanced perspective.</p>
<p>NIH and NSF funding is critical to keep the basic research going, but modern academia mostly fails when it comes to translate the results of those findings into a product beneficial to the society (pharmaceutical, diagnostic test, jet fuel, etc.).</p>
<p>^^I think that is the Syngenta deal (don’t see the company mentioned in the article) which I think was acquired by Monsanto. The company’s literature was deceptively worded to make investors think it was something other than GMO corn.</p>
<p>On Monday, Pfizer Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) today held the official groundbreaking of the new location of Pfizer’s Cardiovascular, Metabolic and Endocrine Diseases (CVMED) and Neuroscience research units at 610 Main St. in Kendall Square.</p>
<p>In September, Pfizer announced it had entered into a 10-year lease agreement with MIT for more than 180,000 square feet. Taking part in the groundbreaking event were: Pfizer executives along with Gov. Deval Patrick and Cambridge Mayor David Maher. </p>
<p>The facility will allow the company to expand its footprint in the growing biopharmaceutical cluster in Cambridge and will create 400 new jobs.</p>
<p>While the new facility is being built, the CVMED research unit will be based in an interim space at Pfizer’s location at 620 Memorial Drive in Cambridge. The neuroscience unit also will relocate to interim space in Cambridge in the second quarter of 2012.</p>
<p>I see nothing wrong with Pfizer opening a research center located in the facility it leases from MIT. At least from this article, it sounds like a pure real estate transaction. Novartis already operates a large research institute of their own in Cambridge. It is no surprise to anyone that biopharma conducts a lot of applied research of their own that leads to the development of pharmaceutical and diagnostic products. They are not interested in the pursuit of purely scientific discoveries and publishing for the sake of creating long publication records. </p>
<p>The conflict of interest and problems arise when corporate money is used to buy out academic researchers (I’m referring to dstark’s ppt post). Ideally, academic research should be funded by money without any “attached strings”, the fruits of such research then licensed by tech transfer offices to companies, and the licensing fees “reinvested” into the academic researchers in the form of institutional grants. However, the reality is quite different.</p>
<p>Dang those nasty drug companies for doing all that research to create those miracle drugs that have cured diseases, kept us comfortable and alive so much longer than before. We need to go back to the good old days where life expectancy was 50. Think of how much money we’d save on Medicare and Social Security.</p>
<p>Pfizer is “publicly traded”, but it is definitely not “public”. It is as private as it gets. MIT is a private institution as well. I’m sure someone got a tax break or two because the creation of this Pfizer center will lead to 400 new jobs in the area, but that is irrelevant to the subject of this thread, which revolves around honest academic researchers being bought out by big, evil corporations. :)</p>