Hope Not Hype - Third World Network

110 Hope Not Hype
of research...While intellectual property rights serve as an incentive to investments in and
commitments to scientific innovation, the reduction of scientific investigations to largely
commercial endeavors whose rewards are largely contingent on obtaining patents will continue
to erode informed public and academic discourse [emphasis added]…And unless there are
radical changes in position on the part of the biotechnology industry, these same concerns are
likely to thwart progress in other important policy areas, such as biological disarmament
(Wright and Wallace, 2000, p. 55).
Several prominent commentators have made the case that the traditional role of the
academic and government researcher is being worn away as governments place more
emphasis on, and bind more funding opportunities to, industry service. Regardless of
whether the industry intends to be controlling, mixing the public and private together
influences what is researched and how research is conducted (Heinemann and Goven,
2006; Katz et al., 2003; Kleinman, 2003; Krimsky, 2004).
[F]aculty with corporate sponsorship are more likely to produce favorable findings and to
withhold data from the scientific community to protect proprietary interests (Shorett et al.,
2003, p. 124).
The results of the private wealth incentive system organized around IPR are seen in
the massive maldistribution in research and development spending that has emerged in the
past few decades. According to a leading science commentary magazine, for the US the
“trend is undeniable. In 1965, the federal government financed more than 60 percent of all
R&D in the United States. By 2006, the balance had flipped, with 65 percent of R&D in
this country being funded by private interests” (Washburn, 2007, p. 66). Internationally,
[a] meager one-third (about U.S. $10 billion) of all global research expenditure on agriculture
is spent on solving the problems of agriculture in developing countries, home to ~80% of the
global population. This amount is less than 3% of the total value of agricultural subsidies that
countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) pay to
maintain their agricultural output…Private sector investments in agricultural research and
development (R&D) reached more than $12 billion in 2000, 30 times the budget of the entire
CGIAR international agricultural research system (Kiers et al., 2008, p. 320).
As governments increasingly tie public biological research investment with industrial
goals (Wright and Wallace, 2000), the private spending tends to leverage more from the
public purse than is immediately apparent just from the ratio of public to private funds
(Crump, 2004).
[F]or scientific knowledge subject to both Open Science and private property institutional
regimes, the granting of IPR is associated with a statistically significant but modest decline in
knowledge accumulation as measured by forward citations (in academic
publications)…Overall, we are able to reject the null hypothesis that IPR have no impact on
the diffusion of scientific knowledge…These patterns provide a novel perspective on the