Just a couple weeks ago, University President Lawrence H. Summers presented a plan to explore murky new possibilities of partnerships with the business sector in an Allston biotechnology empire. The media swooned. But the dangers of such an alliance have already become manifest on this side of the Charles and, for that matter, everywhere else. In Summers’ own words, “conflict of interest is one side of the coin, and synergy is the other.”
Two researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, produced a paper last January that purported that natural variability might be the main cause of the recent global warming trend. The paper contends that the climate change theories that nearly the entire scientific community agrees upon could easily turn out to be misguided, and that better research is needed to substantiate the alarming claims so often made about our potential to disturb the global climate.
Baliunas and Soon are researchers competing for funds from a limited number of sources and can hardly be blamed for accepting oil money. But regardless of whether the technical objections raised by other scientists are really legitimate, a small hitch remains. Baliunas and Soon’s findings bear a curious resemblance to their financial backers’ probable agenda. After all, look at what the oil industry got: A paper that can be used to discredit the half-century of evidence climatologists have accumulated suggesting that human industrial pollution is quickly warming the earth. And, even better, since the study calls for more time-consuming and expensive research before we can make any claims about global temperature change, it gives Bush and the American Petroleum Institute a nice tool to delay any progress on fighting global warming. Bush officials in the Environmental Protection Agency advocated a deeper look into the science of climate change as a preliminary to policymaking, which most of us north of the Mason-Dixon line know is strictly a stalling technique to protect our GDP from the threat of environmental policies. Now they even have Harvard’s name to help make their case.
It would be a waste of time—and, in all likelihood, unfair—to allege that Soon and Baliunas had any intentions apart from doing honest research. But they are left in the uncomfortable position of having to account for the unusual and scientifically controversial nature of their conclusions, which inescapably conform to one of their sponsors’ financial advantage.
When profits contribute to science, there is the grave risk that science will contribute to profits, excluding truth in favor of a more attractive approximation. This is not to say that ties to industry doom scientific endeavors to the service of economic interests or that Summers’ plans for Allston will harm biotechnology at Harvard. But the associations to be forged in this great expansion will require concrete structures of academic oversight, which the administration must create alongside the new facilities and research groups. Let’s stay on the synergy side of the coin.
—Daniel B. Holoch is an editorial editor.
