Philanthropy... For Profit

As funds are cut and budgets tightened nationwide on scientific research, the question of where to get adequate funding for research labs is not only controversial among scientists, but of drastic importance. This problem rears its ugly head in many other sectors, including public education, public health, and social reform policy. In an ideal world, most researchers would like to have complete intellectual freedom to carry out their studies at their own pace. However this is becoming less and less common as ‘venture philanthropy’ takes hold, a practice that couples academic lab with industry. In the Nature article “With Strings”the author argues for professionals to “shrug off their fears”and welcome venture philanthropy, while in “Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools,” from the e-zine Dissent, Joanne Barken offers a perspective that venture philanthropy is failing and need to be reexamined.

It began in 2000, in a case which the Nature author uses to begin their article: “When the Maryland-based Cystic Fibrosis Foundation invested in Californian biotechnology company Aurora Biosciences, it launched a revolution.” The author claims that this type of partnership between scientist and CEO is the future, and will have to be embraced in the coming years if we want to see scientific research continue without declining. The chief assumption that this article brings with it (and one I would expect in a Nature article, or at least one I wouldn’t expect the author to go out of their way to explain) is that scientific research deserves to continue unchecked and that securing these funds is favorable to the alternative. That being said, the funny thing about this article is that it provides little to no evidence to back up its claims. When it says that a partnership between charity foundations and industry researchers is the best way to deliver a product to the shelves, it offers no support to that claim. The only data that the author ever gives is anecdotal-- like the opening line about the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, or later on with a similar line about The Michael J. Fox Foundation-- without ever relaying to the reader how these cases turned out. The article ends with a final base-less claim: that ushering in this new coupling of industry and charity funding will “ultimately help all those involved in health-care research to turn ideas into therapies.”

In the Dissent e-zine article “Got Dough? How Billionaires rule our school outlines an opinion on a similar topic, health and education falling into the hands of private sector managers and owners. They criticize companies such as The Gates Foundation who, through aggressive investment and lobbying, can exert a large amount of influence on the goals and values of our education system. Because they have the funds to change standards they would like to improve (“charter schools, high-stakes standardized testing for students, merit pay for teachers whose students improve their test scores, firing teachers and closing schools when scores don’t rise adequately, and longitudinal data collection on the performance of every student and teacher”) we are seeing concrete changes in the landscape of public education, argues the author. As opposed to the Nature article, this article spouts off studies left and right about its topic-- “Stanford University’s 2009 study of charter schools,” “Vanderbilt University study showed definitively,” “ a National Research Council report confirmed multiple studies”-- however, not one of these studies or reports was cited, and they were often summarized in a single, generalizing statement (“Study X showed that public education is failing”). Barkan’s main claim that venture philosophy in the hands of such financial giants eventually turns corrupt is impactful, but the sources she uses to prove her point are thrown around so willy-nilly it becomes hard to take it seriously at points.

It is interesting to note that the two articles, making markedly different arguments, suffered from problems on the two ends of the spectrum. The Nature article offered so little in terms of supporting evidence that it is completely unpersuasive, while the Dissent article flung around so many uncited facts that it felt desperate and muddled. Although the articles weren’t in direct conversation over the the topic of venture philanthropy in one specific sector, they came away with two different claims. Indeed, in modern culture there are often two sides, arguing for and against the simplest of scientific facts. The anti-vaccination argument has historically always had an undercurrent in society, but recently it blew up when celebrity Jenny McCarthy started a new anti-vaccination movement using her own son’s autism, which she believed he received from a vaccine, as her cornerstone. Scientifically, the movement has always and still holds no merit, yet it continues to make headlines. What makes these arguments so appealing to dissenters? How does controversy spread from such groundless claims?