Research, Ownership, Misconduct—Readers Respond

According to Robert Laughlin, “making universities over into businesses may generate more patents,” but it “also corrupts scientific traditions” and leads to mediocrity and dishonesty. His suggestion that physicists “take the high ground and turn [themselves] into the gold standard of truth” is a laudable one. I hope he can convince his physics colleagues at Stanford University.

Rebecca Lowen has pointed out that, at the start of Stanford’s rise to national prominence in the 1950s, “the physics department was the last, rather than the first, university department to permit faculty members to be hired with government rather than university funds.” ¹ If the department takes Laughlin’s suggestion, the physicists can now be the first, rather than the last, to turn down private money that might distort their dedication to scientific truth. In doing so, however, they will be swimming upstream against both past and current trends at Stanford. For example, a $225 million award to Stanford from a group of international energy companies—ExxonMobil Corp, General Electric Co, and the German company E.ON—was recently announced. This money will fund a 10-year project, to be directed by a professor in petroleum engineering, to study climate change and energy. ²

Although most physicists would probably agree with Laughlin that “economics is not fundamentally what science is about,” economic considerations nevertheless play a major role in research planning and funding decisions. Laughlin thinks the scientist ultimately faces a choice “between creating knowledge and creating property.” To him the choice is clear because “only one is science.” But the processes by which knowledge and products are created are so interrelated and interdependent that separating science and technology is neither possible nor desirable.