On the bias of science: part whatever

Okay, I hope I ' ve swept away enough of the underbrush to get to the tall trees. The basic summary is that it can matter who ' s paying for research, and certainly if a corporate sponsor stands to benefit from a particular outcome a study is more likely to get that outcome. I should have mentioned that this is supported by head-to-head comparisons: evaluations of the same therapeutic modality tend to be more positive when sponsored by the manufacturer than by government. However, the way government funding works, government-sponsored investigators are independent and there is no discernible " government agenda " for research outcomes, although obviously there is an agenda for research questions.But. Decisions about government funding are made by members of the same community of scientists who receive said funding; and priorities about what questions to ask, what theoretical frameworks and methods to use, and what results are considered plausible, are made within communities that tend to have a shared set of beliefs, interests, and epistemological philosophy. I say communities, plural, because there are many different scientific disciplines and while they have fuzzy boundaries and some broad commonalities there are also distinctive qualities of the various sectors. It ' s complicated. People who study human evolution, cosmic history, superconductors, terrestrial climate, and the pathology of fibromyalgia are not usually collaborating a whole lot, nor are they sharing dat...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs