Corporate funding can corrupt science. Some 65% of all research and development in the U.S. is funded by private interests. History shows that the corporate funding of scientific research can be problematic — the tobacco industry offers a potent example. When corporations fund science, is truth the ultimate goal, or is stockholder profit? Please join five outstanding scholars and teachers as they take part in a panel discussion that asks, “Does Corporate Funding Corrupt Science?”"
Bio
Lisa Bero
Lisa A. Bero is a Professor in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy at the School of Pharmacy and Institute for Health Policy Studies, School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco.
Dr. Bero is a pharmacologist with primary interests in how clinical and basic sciences are translated into clinical practice and health policy. She has developed and validated methods for assessing the quality of research and scientific publication and measures influences on the quality of research, including university-industry relations.
Dr. Bero has also conducted analyses to examine the dissemination and policy implications of scientific publications. She has published numerous peer-reviewed scientific articles related to her research as well as co-authored The Cigarette Papers (UC Press, 1996).
Her international activities include: advisor to the World Health Organization Drug Action Programme, advisor to the World Bank, member of the editorial board of the British Medical Journal, Co-Director of the San Francisco Cochrane Center, member of the Steering Group of The Cochrane Collaboration, and editor for the Cochrane Effective Practice and Organization of Care Group -- an international group of researchers conducting meta-analyses of the literature on interventions to change health professional behavior. She serves on several national and international committees related to technology assessment.
Henry T. Greely
Henry T. Greely is the Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law and a professor, by courtesy, of genetics at Stanford University. He specializes in legal and social issues arising from advances in the biological sciences and in health law and policy. He directs the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences, chairs the steering committee of the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics, and directs the Stanford Program on Stem Cells and Society. Greely graduated from Stanford in 1974 and from Yale Law School in 1977. He served as a law clerk for Judge John Minor Wisdom on the U.S. Court of Appeals and for Justice Potter Stewart of the U.S. Supreme Court.
David Patterson
Prof. Patterson's research style is to identify critical questions for the IT industry and gather inter-disciplinary groups of faculty and graduate students to answer them. The answers are typically embodied in demonstration systems, and these demonstration systems are later mirrored in commercial products. His studies both affect research AND train leaders in the field. The best known projects of Prof. Patterson's groups are Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC), Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), and Networks of Workstations (NOW).
A measure of the success of these projects is the list of awards won by Prof. Patterson and his teammates: the C & C Prize, the IEEE von Neumann Medal, the IEEE Johnson Storage Award, the SIGMOD Test of Time Award, the ACM-IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award, and the Katayanagi Prize. He was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Sciences, the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame, and Fellow of the Computer History Museum. The full list includes about 30 awards for research, teaching, and service.
Robert Proctor
Prof. Proctor's current work centers on the history of scientific controversy, especially in 20th and 21st century science, technology, and medicine. He also works on the history of scientific rhetoric, tobacco and body history, Nazi science, expert witnessing, evolution and human origins, geology and gemstone aesthetics, and the cultural production of ignorance (agnotology). His most recent book is the very well-received "Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition." Presently, he is working on "Darwin in the History of Life" which argues that the 19th century evolution revolution can be seen as an effort to historicize life. He is also finishing a book on the history of the lapidary art (Agates Eyes) and a book on changing interpretations of the oldest tools (The Acheulean Enigma).
Richard Zare
Richard N. Zare is the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science at Stanford University. He is a graduate of Harvard University, where he received his B.A. degree in chemistry and physics in 1961 and his Ph.D. in chemical physics in 1964.
In 1965 he became an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but moved to the University of Colorado in 1966, remaining there until 1969 while holding joint appointments in the departments of chemistry, and physics and astrophysics. In 1969 he was appointed to a full professorship in the chemistry department at Columbia University, becoming the Higgins Professor of Natural Science in 1975. In 1977 he moved to Stanford University. He was named Chair of the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University in 2005.
Professor Zare is renowned for his research in the area of laser chemistry, resulting in a greater understanding of chemical reactions at the molecular level. By experimental and theoretical studies he has made seminal contributions to our knowledge of molecular collision processes and contributed very significantly to solving a variety of problems in chemical analysis. His development of laser induced fluorescence as a method for studying reaction dynamics has been widely adopted in other laboratories.
Robert Proctor, Professor of the History of Science at Stanford University, explains ways in which the tobacco industry has manipulated science. Proctor argues that tobacco-friendly scientific research was "mounting a gigantic confusion campaign."
