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14 Strategic Disclosure Requirements and the Ethics of Bioethics
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c h a p t e r f o u r t e e n Strategic Disclosure Requirements and the Ethics of Bioethics v i r g i n i a a . s h a r p e , ph.d. “no conflict, no interest”: the commercialization of science and academia Although there are historical, conceptual, and economic obstacles that make it diªcult to address the ethics of bioethics, the need for such reflection is made more urgent by the growing commercialization of science and academia. Over the last twenty-five years, a number of forces have spurred this commercialization . One was the passage of the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act (Patent and Trademark Act 1980) authorizing licensing and patenting of results from U.S. federally sponsored research. That law has given rise to technology transfer programs at the nation ’s private and public institutions, creating new incentives for academic entrepreneurialism and partnerships with industry. Many legislatures, hoping to spur economic growth in their states, have championed the development of research corridors anchored to partnerships between corporations and public research universities. Entrepreneurial faculty members with the blessing and sometimes the backing of their universities are starting their own companies as a sideline to their university appointments. Between 1992 and 1999 industryfunded research and development at public and private universities grew exponentially , with up to a 725 percent increase at some of the largest state universities (Lawler 2003). Since 1980 more than 4,300 start-up companies have been formed based on a license from an academic institution. These institutions re- ceived an equity interest in close to 70 percent of their start-ups and collected over $1 billion in royalties from patent licensing (Stevens and Toneguzzo 2003). Bart Chernow, the vice dean for research at the Johns Hopkins University medical school has even gone so far as to trumpet Hopkins as “one of the biggest biotech companies in the world” (Birch and Cohn 2001, 1A). Like this university leader, many have enthusiastically embraced business development within academia , pointing to the potential for important scientific advances and to the bene fits of this new revenue to the competitiveness of universities and to the states and regions in which they are located. It is also generally acknowledged, however, that such arrangements introduce significant conflicts of interest—placing researchers ’ and academic institutions’ proprietary or sponsorship interests in conflict with their responsibility to maintain integrity in research and teaching (Washburn 2005). On this subject, the Hopkins vice dean has argued that the school’s new partnerships with industry are essential to the school’s success and competitiveness. “To move your research forward, you’ve got to do partnerships with industry. . . . No conflict, no interest” (Birch and Cohn 2001, 1A). who is buying bioethics? As Carl Elliott has so ably described (2003), commercial aªliations are also increasingly common in the world of bioethics. The AMA Ethics Institute receives funding from the drug industry to develop a code of ethics for the drug industry, Pfizer funds bioethicists at the University of Pennsylvania to write on the ethics of pharmaceutical gift-giving, and Dow, DuPont, and Monsanto have funded that center’s development of an ethics code for the biotechnology industry . Individual bioethicists receive funding as consultants on industry advisory boards or as speakers at industry-sponsored conferences. As in industry-funded science, industry funding to bioethicists has the potential to bias the particular funded work in favor of the sponsor’s interests—the usual focus of concerns about conflicts of interest. It also, and more importantly, has the potential to set the agenda of the field by influencing the scope and focus of bioethical work. Imagine, for example, that bioethics as a field of inquiry has developed primarily in response to issues concerning the biosphere and human activity. The focal issues for bioethicists in this scenario are the role of human activities and our responsibilities regarding the health of global, regional, and local ecosystems and human communities. Bioethicists weigh in on issues such as land use, environmental justice, air and water quality, agricultural biotechnology, s t r a t e g i c d i s c l o s u r e r e q u i r e m e n t s 171 [3.91.8.23] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:46 GMT) habitat and species management, and global warming. Imagine that bioethicists have become key players in the area of environmental...