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The commercialization of the biomedical sciences: (mis)understanding bias

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Abstract

The growing commercialization of scientific research has raised important concerns about industry bias. According to some evidence, so-called industry bias can affect the integrity of the science as well as the direction of the research agenda. I argue that conceptualizing industry’s influence in scientific research in terms of bias is unhelpful. Insofar as industry sponsorship negatively affects the integrity of the research, it does so through biasing mechanisms that can affect any research independently of the source of funding. Talk about industry bias thus offers no insight into the particular epistemic shortcomings at stake. If the concern is with the negative effects that industry funding can have on the research agenda, conceptualizing this influence as bias obscures the ways in which such impact is problematic and limits our ability to offer solutions that can successfully address the concerns raised by the growing role of private funding in science.

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Notes

  1. An important caveat is relevant here. When I say that there is not such a thing as an epistemically correct or incorrect research agenda, I am referring to particular research endeavors rather than to entire research communities or fields. When describing entire research communities, the use of bias to refer to the research agenda could be appropriate if they are failing to provide an encompassing perspective on the phenomena they are considering. As Lacey (2005) has argued, the opposite of bias in this sense would be evenhandedness, where the research in an entire field strives to provide a more comprehensive and balanced research approach. Indeed, as I discuss later in the paper, our current biomedical research enterprise might well be correctly described as offering a biased research agenda given the reductivistic and individualistic conception of health and disease that underlies it. I am thankful to an anonymous review for pointing this out.

  2. One can talk about government interference in science, or about biased research because of the influence of political values. However, these characterizations do not usually refer to the influence of public funding on the research agenda. They describe government actions in a context where a government might oppose particular scientific conclusions (e.g., preventing government scientists from publishing certain research) or refer to particular studies whose epistemic conclusions are thought to be unreliable because of the presumed influence of the political values of scientists or scientific communities. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to clarify this issue.

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Acknowledgements

I want to thank two anonymous reviewers for insightful comments and suggestions. I presented a version of this paper at the conference Biases in Science, held in 2019 at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. I am also thankful to the conference participants for their helpful comments, and particularly to David Teira for his careful reading and suggestions.

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de Melo-Martín, I. The commercialization of the biomedical sciences: (mis)understanding bias. HPLS 41, 34 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-019-0274-x

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