Charles Davis, “Sharing science is a crime,” Al Jazeera, 03 Aug 2013

The more one shares, the more one undermines a future patent application and a system that encourages privatisation.

It doesn’t matter if you start out working for a university. Scientists are given two choices for getting their research funded, academia or not: go to work for the Pentagon or start making something you can patent. And the government and its corporations want it that way.

Of the $140bn in research and development funding requested by President Barack Obama for 2013, according to the Congressional Research Service, more than half goes through the Department of Defense; less than $30bn through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). That invariably leads to a shift in resources, with scientists going to where the money is: instead of finding ways to cure, finding high-tech ways to kill or otherwise aid the war effort. Researchers at the University of Arizona, for instance, received a $1.5m grant to “adapt their breast cancer imaging research for detection of embedded explosives”, which speaks rather well to the US government’s priorities and the toll it takes on research that has the general public in mind. …

“For anyone who tracks trends in funding, our FY 2013 budget ($1.4bn) is roughly equivalent, in absolute dollars, to our FY 2004 budget,” wrote Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), in a May 2013 email to NIMH researchers. “Corrected for inflation, we are nearly back to 1999, essentially ‘undoubling’ our budget.”

Austerity has encouraged research institutions to look to the corporate sector for money. Now, even research that is expensed to the taxpayer is sold off to the highest bidder, universities looking to make an extra buck any way they can. And that means keeping scientific developments a secret. …

Signed into law by President Bill Clinton, the Economic Espionage Act of 1995 makes it a federal offence punishable by up to 15 years in prison for someone to  “knowingly” deliver a “trade secret” into the hands of a foreign government or institution. As written, that means even if someone had the most honest of intentions – hey, maybe people outside of America get cancer too – they would still be considered a spy for letting a scientific secret cross a body of water. If that secret is ever disclosed, it will be disclosed on corporate America’s terms. And it will make someone a lot of money. …

“If you think that your goal as a scientist is to cure disease, you want people in China and everywhere else in the world to know about,” said Michael Eisen, a biologist and advocate of “open science” at the University of California, Berkeley. “Only if you think your purpose is to generate patents and make money do you keep these kinds of things secret,” he says. “It’s a gross perversion of the whole mission of academic research.” …

“Patents are about keeping things away from people for the purpose of making money,” explained Rosalyn Yalow, who won a Nobel prize in 1977 for her work on radioimmunoassay (RIA). The introduced technology revolutionised medicine, allowing medical professionals to detect antibodies and contaminants in a person’s blood, which is useful in the fight against hepatitis, cancer and a whole host of other disorders.

“We never thought of patenting RIA,” Yalow told an interviewer. She was often asked if she regretted not using her invention to get rich, but Yalow wanted as many people to use it as possible. “Anyway, we had no time for such nonsense,” she said. …

Indeed, the modern university has plenty of time for patent nonsense, with “technology transfer” offices set up on campus whose sole purpose it is to try and commercialise their academic(s’) research. Unfortunately for most colleges, filing patents is a losing proposition. While thought of as a way to encourage research, patenting it often has the effect of mothballing it, making scientific discoveries off limits to the other scientists who would otherwise build upon it. That germ of a great idea? Unless someone’s willing to license it for cash, it’s not leaving the petri dish. …

Scientists, and academics in particular, used to be all about the free distribution of their work. Their egos were served primary by people acknowledging their findings, not by being paid massive amounts of money (though that didn’t hurt). At the very least, talk of profits was thought best left to the vulgar businessman.

Henry Dale, a British pharmacologist who won a Nobel Prize in 1936, perhaps best summarised the science-for-science’s-sake position when he wrote that, “the primary and special function of research in the universities is to build the main fabric of knowledge by free and untrammeled inquiry and to be concerned with the practical uses of it, only as these arise in the course of a natural development”.

Dr Dale would not get along with his college’s technology transfer office were he alive today. As Marshall G Hussain Shuler, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University, explains: significant cuts to non-military science – the “undoubling” of NIMH funding, for example – have led to a shift in sources of funding and academic priorities, the former dictating the latter. Once above-it-all academics are now being encouraged to “establish more direct relationships with pharmaceutical companies and the biomedical industry”, he says, “which was once regarded as an obvious cause of conflict of interest.”

Money has a way of changing one’s perspective. So does decades of war.

“The root cause driving austerity,” as Hussain Shuler sees it, “is rampant militarism.” We have money for wars, as a famous American poet observed, but we can’t feed the poor. And we don’t much care about the mental health problems that causes.

Rather, research in neuroscience is increasingly being conducted with an eye toward potential military applications, such as the treatment of combat-related PTSD by way of regret-erasing drugs. And that’s because of who is funding more and more of the research these days: the military. Indeed, the chief financial backer of President Obama’s recently announced $100m ” BRAIN Initiative” – billed as a “bold new research effort to revolutionise our understanding of the human mind” – is DARPA, not the NIMH.

Read the full article here.