Mirowski’s just plain wrong

Letter to a friend of the earth person who loves Philip Mirowski’s book “Science Mart”.

“Dear xxx,

I had a quick read of the IP chapter in the Mirowski book – in fact I just recalled seeing him talk at Sydney Uni on the subject of how the Pharma industry is one big Ponzi Scheme. Entertaining at best it was.

I would say that the IP chapter is a series of opinions, not right nor wrong, just opinions. His big lament is that the neoliberalists have ‘perverted’ science through a number of means, including the modification of the patent system etc etc.

This is one interpretation of the facts but I could think of other interpretations. The scientist in me refuses to assume one hypothesis is correct when I can think of more than one, and none have been tested.

Where this book fails is the view that the evil neoliberalists have perverted the cause of pure science. This nostalgic view of events is appealing to many because it shifts cause to an external group which avoids the scientific community having to face some uncomfortable truths.

I started my research degree in 1985 and was lucky enough to see the shift in the science community from the old regime to the new. And I am very observant!

My preferred hypothesis is that the primary cause for the shift in how science is practised in universities is the shift from the prior era of discovery to the modern era of applications research. Essentially by the 1980’s the core of much practical knowledge was complete – further discovery of nature’s secrets was being pushed to the edges of usefulness (e.g. big bang experiments) or to the sublimely complicated where the refinements in knowledge were not big news (this was explained to me by the laurete, de Gennes, over drinks one night – an example we discussed was colloid science where the fundamentals had been laid down in the 1920’s but in the 1980’s people were finding all sorts of complex colloids where variations had to be explained – de Genne called this science ‘flaws in the crystal’).

So scientists themselves started shifting from the discovery in complex systems to invention in complex systems. They themselves chose this path – it wasn’t forced on them. It was a natural result of the fruits of 300 years of knowledge creation being mostly complete, at least to the point where further efforts were dead dull boring. Try reading this article for more details on this – http://issuu.com/ianmax/docs/cia_march_maxwell

At the same time, grants for science became hard to achieve because of increases in the number of institutions doing research but not a concomitant increase in grant funding.

And then some government grants were carved off for more commercial outcomes.

Universities started dabbling in patents.

Universities started getting management fever as they became responsible for planning and reporting to government.

The response from senior academics and their influential societies? To look after their own grant ‘patch’.See http://issuu.com/ianmax/docs/what-is-happening-at-csiro

In the US (not Australia where they hardly did any research anyway) corporations decided to shut down a of lot their R&D and outsource it to universities. Academics embraced this opportunity for the funding it offered.

In short – all these things happened at once – but the driving force to more applied research was not, in my opinion, caused by these externalities – it was simply a result of the success of 300 years of pure research.

So I disagree with Mirowski in that, while it would be lovely to be an academic again in 1930, that model of pure scientific research simply isn’t needed any more. And indeed if the transition to a new model has led to unpalatable results then the scientific community needs to take a long hard look at itself rather than trying to blame third parties.

Take this Mirowski book with a very large grain of salt!

regards
Ian”