Two TCS articles on academic bellyaching in the hard sciences are chock full of facts but are written like crap. The first one by Sally Baliunas turns into a predicatable love letter to Richard Feynman (a rather brilliant but playe dout figure these days) that also goes after dirty dealing by U.S. reseacher unded by NIH (this means univeristy researchers folks)
According to an eye-popping article in the June 9 Nature, about one-third of more than 3,200 polled U.S. researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health self-reported serious scientific misbehavior during the three years prior to being surveyed. High responses for serious infractions came in categories such as "Failing to present data that contradict one's own previous research" (6% of respondents), "Changing the design, methodology or results of a study in response to pressure from a funding source" (15.5%) and for lesser categories such as "Dropping … data … based on a gut feeling that they were inaccurate" (15.3%). Because the answers are self-reported, the polling researchers think the results may be underestimated. The researchers speculate that misbehaviors are keyed to "perceptions of inequities in the [science] resource distribution" process, and argue that identifying those perceptions might aid the promotion of scientific integrity. Since 1970, total federal non-medical research spending as a fraction of Gross Domestic Product has declined by about one-third. No formal history has tracked research misbehavior, leaving it impossible to say if ongoing stresses on budget allocation systems would partly explain current misbehavior.
I am not sur eof the point of the piece because she seems to get lost half way through it, but some snazzy facts nonetheless.
Iain Murray piece on "Nationalizing Science" is a little more coherent, but still somehow gets lost as well.
It seems as if you can't turn anywhere without hearing that industry is destroying science these days. Former editors of the New England
Journal of Medicine allege that pharmaceutical companies are perverting health science. The National Institutes of Health have instituted strict new ethics rules that forbid researchers dirtying their hands by collaborating with industry. And at the end of July the American Journal of Public Health devoted an entire supplement to essays alleging that industry was somehow distorting the legal and regulatory processes through a series of laws and judgments. All these allegations have a similar purpose: to delegitimize industry's involvement in the scientific process.
Murray's correctly notes that univerisittes ar ehostile to industry and are generally jerk-offs. They are also fraudulent liars:
A new report in the Journal of the American Medical Association has revealed that 16% of highly-cited medical studies were contradicted by subsequent ones, and another 16% were shown by later trials to have overstated results. In short, almost a third of medical studies - ones that were cited over 1,000 times in subsequent studies and articles - were found by subsequent research to be flawed. But contrary to initial impressions, this shows that in medical science the scientific process is working.
But he goes astray with his little constructs, conclusions and dubious flow charts. He also frankly gives universities too much credit for the shear amount of taxpayer money they waste on science research. The truth is if science and technology funding were given driectly to corporations we'd have far more rapid progress towards everything from space exploration to cures for cancer, but for some reason we piss it away on a bunch of tenured lardasses who steal credit from their zitfaced grad students.
The pit bulls. No animal is more wrongly maligned nor forgotten in situations like this. Give 'til it hurts at PBRC today. 
