Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [22]
Once you accept the first small inducement and justify it that way, however, you have started your slide down the pyramid. If you had lunch with a lobbyist to talk about that pending legislation, why not talk things over on the local golf course? What’s the difference? It’s a nicer place to have a conversation. And if you talked things over on the local course, why not accept a friendly offer to go to a better course to play golf with him or her—say, to St. Andrews in Scotland? What’s wrong with that? By the time the politician is at the bottom of the pyramid, having accepted and justified ever-larger inducements, the public is screaming, “What’s wrong with that? Are you kidding?” At one level, the politician is not kidding. Dorothy Samuels is right: Who would jeopardize a career and reputation for a trip to Scotland? The answer is: no one, if that were the first offer he got; but many of us would, if it were an offer preceded by many smaller ones that we had accepted. Pride, followed by self-justification, paves the road to Scotland.
Conflict of interest and politics are synonymous, and everyone understands the cozy collaborations that politicians forge to preserve their own power at the expense of the common welfare. It’s harder to see that exactly the same process affects judges, scientists, and physicians, professionals who pride themselves on their ability to be intellectually independent for the sake of justice, scientific advancement, or public health. These are professionals whose training and culture promote the core value of impartiality, so most become indignant at the mere suggestion that financial or personal interests could contaminate their work. Their professional pride makes them see themselves as being above such matters. No doubt, some are; just as, at the other extreme, some judges and scientists are flat-out dishonest, corrupted by ambition or money. (The South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk, who admitted that he had faked his data on cloning, was the scientific equivalent of former congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham, who went to prison for taking millions in bribes and evading taxes.) In between the extremes of rare integrity and blatant dishonesty are the great majority who, being human, have all the blind spots the rest of us have. Unfortunately, they are also more likely to think they don’t, which makes them even more vulnerable to being hooked.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, most scientists ignored the lure of commerce. When Jonas Salk was questioned about patenting his polio vaccine in 1954, he replied, “Could you patent the sun?” How charming, yet how naïve, his remark seems today; imagine, handing over your discovery to the public interest without keeping a few million bucks for yourself. The culture of science valued the separation of research and commerce, and universities maintained a firewall between them. Scientists got their money from the government or independent funding institutions, and were more or less free to spend years investigating a problem that might or might not pay off, either intellectually or practically. A scientist who went public, profiting from his or her discoveries, was regarded with suspicion, even disdain. “It was once considered unseemly for a biologist to be thinking about some kind of commercial enterprise while at the same time doing basic research,” says bioethicist and scientist Sheldon Krimsky.9 “The two didn’t seem to mix. But as the leading figures of the field of biology began intensively finding commercial outlets and get-rich-quick schemes, they helped to change the ethos of the field. Now it is the multivested scientists who have the prestige.”
The critical event occurred in 1980, when the Supreme Court ruled that patents could be issued on genetically modified bacteria, independent of its process of development. That meant that you could get a patent for discovering