It is always good to fund research, because it is essential that we continue to question and investigate our world. For this reason it is difficult to determine what are good or bad reasons for funding. No matter how science is discovered or for what means, it is always a good reason to research and provide money to do this. Of course we can all agree that theoretically public domains are supposed to be the most appropriate funders, because they are supposed to provide information useful and available to everyone in the world (the public). For example they concentrate research on important fundamental factors which mainly concern health, trying to find new remedies to cure illnesses. However, profit based research can still be driven by good reasons, since it's findings may be still very useful on a smaller day to day basis. Not only but by deciding to have a profit based scientific research, scientists and other people involved, work more efficiently. This reason of using a private domain to fund research, and use financial motivation to motivate and consequently increase performance can be very effective.
It is difficult to determine whether a reason for scientific research is 'good' or 'bad' because all scientific research can bring benefits to the worlds population. For example, the development of Humulin, a form of insulin which helps people suffering of diabetes mellitus, one might argue that it is a 'good' reason and a bad one as well. Many could dispute that this research, as most biotechnology, was conducted mainly for the sake of the profits it would have provided and only secondarily for the science and human benefits it would have brought. This shows that commercial research does not direct its funding to the most urgent or useful problems in society but rather regards with more important the projects which will bring higher profit. This may be a reason for which one could say private domain funding is based on 'bad' reasons, because profit driven research does not enable scientists to concentrate on urgent problems. For example, even though 8% of Africa's population is infected by HIV, there is very little advancement in trying to find a cure or at least drugs to alleviate the symptoms of the disease. This is because there would be no profit from such research since africa is a poor continent and cannot pay for such medication. This shows how commercial domain of scientific research is a 'bad' reason for scientific research, knowledge given by science should be available to everyone!
When discussing however if private domain research is 'bad' or 'good' we must take into consideration much more than just the reasons for which the research is enabled. One could in fact argue that private domain research has many times eased life for many people, for example as we have seen in the example above, with diabetes; even if at the same time has brought profit for many families, which can also be seen as another benefit. However as shown in this other example of how a telephone company which privately funded a research to discover whether telephones did or did not cause damage to people's health, lead to 'bad' research. This can be proven because the same research was brought out also by the government which publicly funded the same investigation. The results were surprisingly, or not surprisingly, very different. Approximately 30% of scientists in the private funded research sustained the telephone caused problems, in comparison to the 70% of scientists in the public domain. This proves the fact that private domains, wanting to achieve the goal of making profit do not always consider it important to conduct 'good', useful research, but rather use research as a method of marketing to persuade costumers to buy their product. For this reason, many times private funding does not produce the most reliable results, since they are normally what the company expected and needed. Also another point which can be argued is that private domain could cut corners in order to achieve results quicker and have less costs. In order that scientific research is valuable one must take close attention and try and make experiments are reliable and accurate as possible. However, this can take a long time and some times, especially in profit funded research, scientists are forced to conduct research in the least amount of time, not having the possibility to for example test results efficiently. This is why private domain research can be classified as 'bad'.
I believe that instead of calling this 'bad' science, private funded research, we should differ 'good' and 'bad' research based on the way in which scientists have arrived to their results. Both public and private domains are able for one reason or the other to cut corners and produce useless research. 'Bad' science occurs when research is not conducted in the appropriate way. This is more likely to happen with private domain funding, because there is a strong common reason/goal which drives people to do this research quickly and not for the right simple scope of scientific knowledge.
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[1]http://www.ehow.com/about_6137969_importance-scientific-research.html
[2]http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_does_science_relate_to_your_everyday_lives
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lulupollice (student)
