Science's Worst Enemy: Corporate Funding

In recent years there have been a number of highly visible attacks on American science, everything from the fundamentalist assault on evolution to the Bush administration’s strong-arming of government scientists. But for many people who pay close attention to research and development (R&D), the biggest threat to science has been quietly occurring under the radar, even though it may be changing the very foundation of American innovation. The threat is money -- specifically, the decline of government support for science and the growing dominance of private spending over American research.

The trend is undeniable. In 1965, the federal government financed more than 60 percent of all R&D in the United States. By 2006, the balance had flipped, with 65 percent of R&D in this country being funded by private interests. According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, several of the nation’s science-driven agencies -- the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior, and NASA -- have been losing funding, leading to more "outsourcing" of what were once governmental science functions. The EPA, for example, recently began conducting the first nationwide study on the air quality effects of large-scale animal production. Livestock producers, not taxpayers, are slated to pay for the study. "The government is clearly increasing its reliance on industry and forming ‘joint ventures’ to accomplish research that it is unable to afford on its own anymore," says Merrill Goozner, a program director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group.

The full text of this article can be found at: http://discovermagazine.com/2007/oct/sciences-worst-enemy-private-funding