Very interesting article with a good overview of some of the problems related to science as it is practiced.
1. The article talks about science generally but it is quite clearly about STEM fields, i.e. it is in practice about “hard/fundamental” science and not the social sciences or humanities. Indeed, the divide is less clear than sometimes thought (for example Wallerstein had some intruiging remarks about the historical position of social sciences between the humanities and “pure” sciences). Still, it is probably relevant to explicitly consider these different categories because the conditions surrounding funding, hiring and even political perspective situation is quite different for non-STEM researchers. For example, there is no large industry for historians to get hired into, which likely makes the discrepancy between early stage researchers and permanent positions even more unfavorable. Also, the sometimes caricatured “radical professors” will tend to be in the humanities and various economists, historians, philosophers, sociologists and others have produced worthwhile political theoretical work at universities.
2. The article is from a USA-centric perspective, I would like to highlight some differences with the non-USA science situation. In many countries, the military/defense is not an as major source of funding in science. Academic workers are often expected to be internationally mobile. Doing some research in the United States is seen as desirable and as a great asset on one’s cv when applying for a competitive academic position. There is also the process of brain drain, where only highly educated and talented researchers are allowed to emigrate, with a strong incentive such as high wages. For example, almost half of doctors in born in Senegal expatriate to OECD countries such as France.
3. The relation between fundamental public research and the pharmaceutical industry using these results to advance clinical trials and marketed drugs is a bit more complicated than pure predatory behavior on big pharma’s end. Indeed most exploratory fundamental research in this field is done by publicly funded academic groups (like disease hypotheses, target validation, discovery of initial hits and probes, and so on), it’s generally accepted the real bottleneck of drug discovery is clinical trials. A phase 3 trial (a large scale and relatively long term human trial of a novel pharmaceutical before market approval) is a costly endeavor and can just not fit within the scope of a lab, a research group or even a spin-off. Could a publicly funded, non-profit framework achieve such a result? It certainly can (and did – in the USSR), but science as we know it is too fragmented to even consider such an approach feasible. Currently, seeking drug approval is a game only high budget, high risk, high profit commercial organizations are willing and able to play. Some academic groups have tried isolated novel experiments, such as open source collaborations (e.g. for malaria and schistosomiasis) but these have tended to quietly fizzle out without any real results, because the antagonistic system itself needs to change if this is to be more than a fun academic exercise. Actually, academic groups and their medicinal chemistry projects are often mocked by industry colleagues, because from the industry perspective people looking to get published simply don’t understand how (and in their parlance – are not “incentivized”) to get new efficacious drugs in people. In practice, for many research groups in this area building up a university spin-off and then selling intellectual property or having a milestone based agreement with a big pharmaceutical company is the ideal outcome. Often investigators are actively looking to get their ideas taken by pharmaceutical companies and developed into marketed drugs, and their institutes and granting agencies will also reward them for the successful academia-industry collaboration. They are not just the helpless victims of opportunistic industry vultures, but have every reason to opt in. This highlights once again that in the neoliberal university, the perfect researcher is a rockstar that can deliver grant money, industry money and great PR.
4. The unequal distribution of COVID-19 vaccines has highlighted the anti-human aspects of intellectual property regulations but the situation is actually even worse than only perverse protections of patent rights. The mRNA vaccines’ chains of production are impossible to reproduce at scale in a timely manner, because this involves various contractors, specialized machinery, confidential procedures which are not described explicitly in the patents etc. In the initial stages of scaled up production, Pfizer itself encountered supply chain issues: the vaccines don’t require just mRNA, which is fairly straightforward to produce at scale, but require specialized equipment to produce and formulate lipid nanoparticles that require boutique lipids that only a few specialized manufacturers on earth are able to produce at scale, all kinds of custom equipment was used and various problems of this nature slowed down the manufacturing process, even for a company with perfect information, scale up experience, high urgency and a virtually endless budget. The ultimate proof that patents are not the only obstacle to vaccine equity is that Moderna actually stated it will not enforce its patents for the duration of the pandemic. For the aforementioned reasons this is not as kind of a gesture as it sounds, because no one can reproduce this sophisticated multistep process in a low cost, safe and fast manner anyway.
5. I think the authors might overstate the revolutionary potential of their fellow scientists, which as relatively well-compensated well-respected skilled workers in general would be expected to have a petit bourgeois outlook. Not only liberals fall victim to a vulgar “scientism” – for practictioners of the art this is even more seductive as it affords a self-legitimization narrative. To a certain limit, agitating generally for better conditions is a necessary and valid approach: protecting and helping early stage researchers, counteracting systematic inequalities, solving problems around funding, embracing independent routes of enquiry. However this would be limited to a worker’s rights framework and would not entail a transformation of the practice of science, of how research is done and what it’s done for, and accomplishing these aims do not at all have to lead to a fundamental break with current state of affairs. Based on personal discussions with colleagues, most don’t see a real fundamental problem with the current arrangement, only various practical, budgetary, technical ones, and changing their minds and perspective is not a trivial task at all. Often people in science will be especially convinced they have a rational, apolitical, neutral, fact-based stance. To convince these colleagues to break out of their immersion in a self-legimization discourse will be a formidable task indeed. ,
Regards,
