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APPLIANCE OF SCIENCE: Thomas Barlow wonders whether there is always a conflict of interest when private money becomes entangled
Jump to full article: Financial Times (uk), 2001-05-26
Author: THOMAS BARLOW
Intro: All of which is not to pretend that the way the new Nottingham University International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility has been funded isn't disturbing. Or that the editor of the British Medical Journal, who resigned a professorship in medical journalism at the university over this very issue, was not right to do so.
After the chilling cash-for-letters scandal of the 1980s, in which tobacco companies paid established scientists to write letters to medical journals playing down the dangers of passive smoking, medical journalists tend to be acutely sensitive about the ways in which corporate money can be used to manipulate public debate.
But, even as one remembers this, it's salutary to note that the out-of-control university-industrial complex remains for most university scientists a sideshow: and, for the rest of us one therefore presumes, more of a psychological condition for the earnestly minded, than a grave, ubiquitous reality.
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