Robert B. Laughlin’s gross extrapolation (Physics Today, December 2002, page 10) from a single incident at Bell Labs—the first in its 77-year history—to an indictment of the whole of industry research is wrong on every plane.
The assertion that scientific misconduct in industry research is not only more frequent than in publicly funded research but indeed common is unsubstantiated by the essay. In fact, that comment is directly at odds with the results of investigations by those agencies that oversee federally funded research. The Office of Research Integrity, which oversees research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and related agencies, has gathered some revealing statistics from annual reports on possible research misconduct during the six-year period 1991–96. Universities, both public and private, constitute 26.5% of those entities that answer to ORI, yet they account for 68% of the institutions at which misconduct was found. Small businesses, on the other hand, make up 43% of those institutions that answer to ORI but only 4.9% of the misconduct findings. The office of NSF’s inspector general publishes a semiannual report of shenanigans by its grantees. According to the reports of the past few years, almost all misconduct findings were in universities—though it should be noted that most NSF grants go to university research.
I’d like to see the statistics for grant falsifications for all federally sponsored research. I strongly suspect they too would refute Laughlin’s thesis. The “inherent truthfulness” of university research doesn’t explain why the overwhelming majority of research misconduct findings occur at universities and not in industry labs. In light of the facts, is Laughlin willing to admit that some fraction of the university-style research portfolio that he is so proud of is “simply lies” as he callously characterized industry research?
I’ve worked in both environments, and the pressure to fudge both data and dollars is as easy to understand in an academic environment as in an industrial one. “Publish or perish,” the law of the land in academia, translates to “patent or perish” in industry. But a private company faces a much more punishing feedback mechanism—namely, bankruptcy—to ensure accountability than any public enterprise. When a private company gets caught defrauding the taxpayers, there are unanimous calls for retribution. But such brutal accountability is hard to find in the public sphere. A tenured professor can be convicted and imprisoned for falsifying grants, get out of jail, and return to his or her old job. Does anyone expect Jan Hendrik Schön to ever work at Bell Labs again?
The notion that the products of industry research remain cloaked in secrecy is false. They are usually submitted for public scrutiny in the form of a patent application. Every such application includes a full disclosure of the technology involved and any discoveries that led to it. Anyone can read it, learn from it, and build upon that knowledge. Trade secrets are a rarity in industry because they are so hard to keep. Most industry leaders recognize the importance of open lines of inquiry and only clamp down when they are close to something patentable.
The idea that secrecy breeds impropriety is absurd. A secret that is untrue is a worthless secret. And a patent based on such information isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. The “rottenness” of any fraudulent research in industry does not “take an extremely long time to reveal itself”—investors tend to be an impatient and shortsighted lot. Even if the work should somehow lead to production, products that don’t work don’t sell terribly well. And it is not at all clear how a company’s shoddy research might “clog the pipeline of innovation,” especially if that research is being done in secret. Did all semiconductor research grind to a halt when Bell Labs thought it had a transistor without avalanche breakdown? Schön and company published their phony results and others tried and failed to reproduce them. It remains for Laughlin to prove that the whole corrective process took longer at Bell Labs than it would have in a university lab. Remember, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann “discovered” cold fusion in a university lab.
The “fiery independence” of university researchers receives praise from Laughlin, but few individuals possess the fiery independence of an entrepreneur. Revenues from patents offer universities some genuine independence by relieving them of at least some fundraising burden.
The claim that science is driven by selfless altruism is nonsense. We do it because it’s fun—a distinctly selfish motivation. And never discount the value of simple greed. Greed is a terrific source of motivation, and far more reliable than altruism.
Bottom line: The decision to do something dishonest is a personal one and is more indicative of a character flaw than the avarice or altruism of one’s employer. Honest, productive research can thrive in either industry or university environments. There are good arguments for supporting university research. Laughlin’s isn’t one of them.
