The seed point for this particular post comes from Dr. David Gorski’s recent post on Science-Based Medicine about the Pharma-Shill Gambit. But I’m not going to dwell on the idea that anyone who speaks out against the alt-med industry is deeply in the pockets of Big Pharmaceutical. Instead, I seek to pose the question of who should be responsible for paying for scientific advancement.

I live in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. It’s a great place to live for the most part, and I love it here. But the biggest down-side is the lack of foresight. I don’t believe this is a Calgary-only problem, but one that is all over the world and impacts almost every imaginable aspect of human society. But Calgary is a good model. Many years ago, I sent an email to my alderman wondering about urban sprawl. At the time, we were nearing the one million people mark, and the city’s solution to growth was to build outwards. The direct result of this decision as has been seen in countless other cities is the massive problems in the inner city, and the huge cost of building schools, transit service, hospitals, and all the other amenities needed as young families continue to move further and further into the sticks. The response was typical of all of the conversations I’ve had with my elected representatives. I received a form letter assuring me that they were going to be starting a group to evaluate options and opportunities using best-practices learned from other cities of similar size and growth patterns. Never fear! A council would be formed!

Today, nothing has changed. We’re closing schools and building new ones as fast as we can because applying the brakes to urban sprawl is a necessary but unpopular decision. People want their own brand new house. Telling them they need to consider anything less is just out of the question because that’s not how you get re-elected.

We’re a short-sighted people. I don’t know if that’s evolutionary or if it’s a sign of the times, but we want our corporations to grow by 15% per year forever, we want more services, and we want to pay less taxes. The math just doesn’t work out.

So who pays for science in all of this? Well, right now the funding for science comes largely from government and private industry, generally the pharmaceutical companies who are looking to fund research that they can leverage into new products and services. We get all up in government’s grill when they fund research we don’t understand, such as Sarah Palin’s ignorant attack on fruit fly research. We question why Our Tax Dollars are going to fund “ridiculous” scientific research projects, but we’re not in a position to say what is or is not ridiculous because we don’t have the information. The Palin fruit fly example fits this nicely.

We want free health care but we don’t want taxes. We want a cure for cancer, but we don’t want taxes. Oh sure, we sponsor that woman from accounting who’s doing the cancer walk this year, and I’m sure our $50 goes a long way to determining a cure for cancer. But there are no fun runs for understanding Neanderthal genomes and there’s no big motorcycle ride to evaluate the evolution of transferable antibiotic resistance in coliform bacteria. So it’s down to government or big business.

Why would big business care about any of this? A corporation has a single mandate, and that is to make a profit. What reason on earth would they fund science unless it directly related to increasing their ability to profit? Oil companies fund all kinds of research into geology and oil extraction, but they’re not likely to give a fig about fruit flies unless we can show a way to refine them into some sort of usable goo. No, the companies whose pockets are most likely to open at the promise of medical research are those who can then use that research for their profit margin. The pharmaceutical companies.

As Dr. Gorski points out, of course this presents a conflict of interest. But it’s a matter of trying to see the conflict and determine whether or not the evidence from the research holds up to scrutiny or not. And that is the amazing thing about scientists, they love to peer review one another and figure out what evidence holds water.

Quite frankly, we need more public funding for scientific research. We can find the dollars by doing things like getting rid of tax-exempt status for churches and stopping our federal dollars from getting spent on building churches (another fine example, this time from M.P. Jim Prentice, of a form letter ensuring me that this was money well spent). Someone has to pay for scientific research, and I agree that the more that money doesn’t come from the pharmaceutical industry, the better off we’ll be. But someone still has to pick up the tab. It sure as hell isn’t going to be fun runs and bake sales.

Jim