Can marketplace science be trusted?

Abstract

our years after the first issue of Nature was published, the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) faced an existential crisis. In October 1873, one of its original members demanded the expulsion of another member for swindling. Josiah Whitney, California's state geologist, accused Benjamin Silliman Jr, professor of applied chemistry at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, of accepting large sums from California oil companies in return for favourable, possibly fraudulent, science. Silliman responded forcefully that company funding for science was evidence of responsibility, not misconduct: companies needed objective "technical opinions". Without science, swindling would be more common, he argued. NAS president Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and a former consultant to Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, had to agree. If the NAS expelled every member who had ever consulted for a private company, it would not survive. Henry rejected the efforts to remove Silliman. More importantly, he resolved to expand the NAS membership; new members were to be judged on the basis of their research, not on the source of their income 1. By the 1870s, it was already clear that industry relied on science. The Silliman-Whitney controversy marked a watershed in the relationship between science and industry. For US scientists, as well as many in Britain and Europe, private companies had become valuable patrons, supplying both funds for research and problems to be researched, and were gainful employers who provided short-term commissions. Likewise, companies regarded scientists and their findings as profitable to the development of their respective industries. Historian Paul Lucier traces the explosion and fragmentation of industrial research in the fifth essay in a series on how the past 150 years have shaped today's science system.

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“…Even the esteemed journal Nature made that mistake in 2019, and corrected itself in 2020. 1,2 It seems that Cetus was founded some five years earlier, and that others must also be counted among the bold. That would include Gamma Biologicals and Irvine Scientific.…”

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