Science is selling us out

The law of gravity belongs to all but our DNA codes are becoming private property. The change is profound, argues Tom Wilkie. Science is becoming a commercial, not a social enterprise

One of my heroes has just shown that he has feet of clay. Peter Goodfellow, the brilliant and youthful professor of genetics at Cambridge University, is the man who, a few years ago, discovered the gene for gender. In a fantastic piece of scientific research, he isolated and identified the short stretch of human DNA that contains the genetic "switch" telling a developing embryo that it should become a boy rather than a girl.

Together with Robin Lovell Badge at the National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, Professor Goodfellow took the equivalent gene isolated from mice and rewrote the genetic instructions of a mouse embryo. The mouse, which had been conceived as a female, was born with all the impedimenta of a male - indeed, it was a male.

Perhaps because I am a man, I have always found that particular piece of genetics awesome. Around the world, thousands of scientists are at work deciphering the mysteries of human DNA and discovering new genes at the rate of about one a week. But, somehow, the essence of masculinity reduced to a stretch of DNA seems to me profoundly humbling; while the fact that we can know this fact about ourselves at all is profoundly inspiring - a scientific fulfilment of the Socratic injunction, "know thyself".

Professor Goodfellow is a man I admire because he has expanded and enriched my perception and understanding of myself and of the world in which I live. And I am old fashioned enough to believe that knowledge is preferable to ignorance and that understanding is good in itself. But at the beginning of July, Professor Goodfellow leaves Cambridge to work for SmithKline Beecham, the multinational pharmaceutical company, and the fruits of his fertile brain will become the private intellectual property of a commercial company.

I was brought up in the post-war faith that science was both the disinterested pursuit of knowledge and also an extraordinarily powerful motor for innovation and the betterment of humanity. The title of an essay by the late Sir Peter Medawar, a British Nobel prizewinner - that science offered "The hope of progress" - captured perfectly the mood of the times, that change was change for the better.

The idea of science as a moral rather than a commercial enterprise was codified as long ago as 1947, by the sociologist Robert K Merton. In his essay "The normative structure of science", he set out the moral and social values that had to govern scientific endeavour. It is the adherence of scientists to these norms that permits us to appeal to science as an "objective" body of knowledge. To this day they are known as the "Mertonian norms":

Communality - scientific knowledge is public knowledge because, in part, it is performed collaboratively as a social enterprise by the scientific community;

Universality - scientific advance should be objective and impersonal. An individual scientist's race, nationality, class or personal characteristics are irrelevant to the science he or she does;

Disinterestedness - scientists should be motivated by the search for truth, not biased by the thought of personal or financial advancement;

Originality - science makes progress because researchers enjoy the academic freedom to choose for themselves their research problems and techniques;

Scepticism - scientific claims must be subjected to scrutiny out in the open by a process of public verification.

But Medawar's hope of progress has withered and, with it, the idea that science can be pursued for its own sake. The Mertonian norms were as much prescriptive as descriptive and the old values are changing, The accountants have been let in, and science must now pay its way. Neither morals nor Mertonian norms are the priority of the market.

The reason for Professor Goodfellow's move is simple: money. Not so much personal enrichment, but the basic wherewithal to continue the science at which he is so good. In explaining his decision to go, Professor Goodfellow commented that even at Cambridge, "it has been a strain to maintain the infrastructure needed to carry out internationally competitive research, and the financial constraints have been getting worse."

Ample corroboration for his view was provided last week, when the Government published the figures for its spending on science and technology. Ten years ago, the Government spent pounds 6.5bn on all aspects of research and development. In 1998, its Forward Look at government-funded science engineering and technology envisages that only pounds 4.9bn will be spent - pounds 1.6bn a year less. All the figures are in 1994 currency, so this is a decrease of a quarter in "real terms". Roughly pounds 31m more was spent on research and development every week of the year by Mrs Thatcher's government of 1985 compared with what Mr Major will spend if he wins the next election.

At the press conference to publish the Forward Look, Ian Taylor, the minister for science, disputed the importance of absolute figures. Government expenditure is under pressure across all departments, he pointed out, so one should look at the relative position of science. It is a fair point, but unfortunately for Mr Taylor, the figures reveal that whereas civil science used to occupy about 2.45 per cent of government-spending in 1986, it now gets a meagre 1.99 per cent - a drop of about one-fifth.

Many scientists are hanging on, in the Micawberish hope that something - presumably a Labour government - will turn up. In this analysis, the past 17 years have been some sort of dreadful aberration; once the government has changed, normal conditions will be restored and public funds for science will start to flow.

But it is a misreading of history to believe that problems for the scientific enterprise in Britain began with Mrs Thatcher's government. It was, after all, Shirley Williams, secretary of state for education and science in the last Labour government, who penned a piece in the Times that started with the ominous phrase: "For the scientists, the party is over."

Although the cuts began with Mr Callaghan, Mrs Thatcher's government did have a philosophical problem fitting science into the marketplace. Traditionally, much of what is produced in research laboratories is public knowledge - one cannot, for example, patent the law of gravity. Science is a "public good" not only in the sense of something morally worthwhile but also in the sense of being public property. However, modern science is expensive: it may be a public good but it is not a free good. It thus makes no sense for a commercial company to spend its shareholders' money in acquiring basic scientific knowledge when what comes out will be public knowledge that will benefit other companies that have not paid the cost of producing the knowledge.

In a recent issue of the scientific journal Nature, Eugene Wong of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology pointed out that the entire modern electronics industry depends at a fundamental level on applied quantum mechanics. "But even with the benefit of hindsight," he writes, "quantum mechanics would not have been a good private investment," because no one company could have appropriated quantum mechanics as its own shareholders' intellectual property.

In the face of this conflict with their ideology, Conservative governments since 1979 have vacillated. At one time, science was to nestle ever closer to industry: Kenneth Baker, when he was secretary of state for education and science, commended that scientists should get to know the delights of the business lunch.

Then the emphasis changed as the Lawson boom took off: industry, freed from the corporatist shackles of the 1970s, was now profitable again and so able to pay for "near market" research itself, whereas it was the proper role of government to fund the basic research that could not be captured as private property. In the face of a second recession, the emphasis switched back again with the publication of the 1993 White Paper Realising our Potential which focused on science for "wealth creation".

Here is where a profound change is taking place in the nature of science itself. The boundary of what is science for the public good and science as the commercial property of a private company is changing. SmithKline Beecham, for example, has a major share in a privately held database of human gene sequences compiled by two American organisations: Human Genome Sciences and the Institute for Genomic Research in Maryland. To adopt a phrase from a different area of discourse these sequences are "the common heritage of mankind" and would once have been regarded as basic scientific knowledge - a public good. But with the advent of modern information processing techniques, a company can score commercial advantage by being able to compare a DNA sequence published in the open scientific literature with those that it holds on its confidential database. Given the drought of public funds for research, SmithKline Beecham's commercial policy becomes attractive to those who want to do basic scientific research. Seen in this context, Professor Goodfellow's departure from academe is a reasonable move for a brilliant scientist.

Analysis of the main journals, carried out by the Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex University, shows that academic institutions now play a much diminished role in the production of scientific knowledge, while a growing proportion of the authors of scientific papers are employees of commercial companies. John Ziman has also charted this change in a lecture to the Royal Society and in his book, Of One Mind: The Collectivisation of Science.

Given Britain's dismal record of transforming its scientific discoveries into innovative products that can be sold for profit in the marketplace, surely this trend is something to welcome, not to worry about? The short answer is that, even allowing for the recent spectacular stock market investments in start-up biotechnology companies such as British Biotech, there is precious little evidence either that established British companies are investing in research and development or that financial conditions are right to call forth a British flowering of start-up biotechnology companies.

The world's top 200 companies spent 4.7 per cent of sales revenue on research and development in 1995, whereas the top 12 UK companies (which are included in the world top 200) spent a mere 2.6 per cent of sales on research and development. As a proportion of the UK's national wealth - GDP - British industry was spending less on research and development in 1994 than it had been in 1981.

The larger problem is that we might lose the old objectivity of science for no compensating gain. In January 1995, for example, the journal Addiction carried an editorial discussing concerns about commercial pressures on the reporting of research results. These pressures were being exerted by, among others, the alcohol and tobacco industries anxious to downplay data that might adversely affect sales of their products.

Such concerns are particularly acute regarding research about addiction, but the journal also highlighted issues of common concern across science: fraudulent data; plagiarism; double publication of the same piece of work; and "honorary authorship", where people are placed on the list of authors even though they have made no genuine contribution to the work being reported. Further indicators that the power of the old norms is diminishing are the recent appearance of several cases not of error, but of outright scientific fraud.

Commercial pressure on basic science is not confined to Britain. It is best described in, of all places, Michael Crichton's introduction to his book Jurassic Park: "The commercialisation of molecular biology is the most stunning ethical event in the history of science and it has happened with astonishing speed. For 400 years since Galileo, science has always proceeded as a free and open inquiry into the workings of nature." Crichton notes that when Watson and Crick discovered the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, "it was confidently expected that their discovery would be selflessly extended to the greater benefit of all mankind. Yet that did not happen." Instead, research scientists in molecular biology became entrepreneurs setting up biotechnology companies: "Suddenly it seemed as if everyone wanted to become rich."

Crichton is right to be concerned. With the loss of our adherence to the Mertonian norms, we may be in danger of shutting down the motors that have driven Western scientific inquiry, and its consequent moral and material development, since the dawn of the Enlightenment.