I like this one from the Chron... Has money become sole motivator? Let's begin with a pop quiz. Which one of these words best describes Jonas Salk: (a) altruist, (b) pure scientist, (c) chump, or (d) all of the above. This is not exactly a trick question. You see, the man who discovered the polio vaccine never made a penny from it. Asked who owned the vaccine, Salk answered, "the people." This scientist didn't live in obscurity or die in poverty. But what would have happened if he'd begun his research today? Would the funders and the institutions have preferred that he apply his genius to a cure for baldness or impotence rather than polio? Would the scientist himself have held out for a piece of the vaccine action? I spring this polio pop quiz because I just read in the Journal of the American Medical Association of another half-hearted attempt to shore up the crumbling wall between the academy and the marketplace, the researcher and the salesman. The article, co-authored by Joseph Martin, dean of the Harvard Medical School, is one more entry in the unhappy, ongoing debate about science and business, nonprofit and profit, altruism and chumphood. Since 1980, when medical academies were first allowed to patent and license the federally funded fruits of their research and cut researchers in on the royalties, pharmaceutical and biotech companies have gotten far more entangled. As Marcia Angell, who kept a spotlight on such issues when she edited the New England Journal of Medicine, says, "Increasingly, academic medicine is merging its mission with that of drug companies." The mission to find answers to important questions has merged, and sometimes been submerged, into the mission to increase the value of shareholders' stock. At worst, we've seen companies try to repress or change the results of research. One company sued researchers because the scientists published disproof of the company's product. But along with this, a more subtle result has been to skew professional norms. As some scientists become business partners, those who don't go for the gold, or don't go where the gold is, can be recast as losers. In an economy that changes at Internet speed, there is the growing expectation that everyone wants a piece of the action. Some universities are becoming more like licensing agencies. Others have created offices to turn campus research into high-tech business. Meanwhile, the mania to patent everything and everyone down to the DNA has made some researchers less likely to share their work. Why share when you can sell? As Stanford law professor Margaret Jane Radin notes, "We have a culture in which someone who gives something to humanity is a chump." Will this extend to volunteers for medical research? In some studies, whole communities participate in research, committed to the common good. If the researcher is making a bundle, will volunteers begin to feel like chump change? In the JAMA article, the authors propose modest ways to create some safeguards and distance between the medical academy, researchers and the companies that fund them. Fine. But they equivocate, "Any solution must also preserve the personal incentives that motivate innovation ... " I am not naive about money as a motive. Nor do I believe that scientists should take a poverty vow. But sometimes it seems as if we've boiled down all incentives for creative work -- everything from altruism to sheer intellectual curiosity -- to one: financial. The more we frame everything in society as a cost-benefit analysis, the more it becomes true. We lose sight of other motives and more common goods. Before he died, Salk told a reporter what his reward had been. He had given people, especially parents, a gift: "Freedom from fear. That's the most powerful of all emotions. I sure learned how important freeing people from fear would be." Some chump. - Goodman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Boston Globe. ------------------ "You know what they say about the music business. Here today, gone TODAY! - Chris Rock at the MTV Music Video Awards
