Lazy Snobs and Conflict of Interest
29/01/10 16:05 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Submitted by S. Pelech - Kinexus on Tue, 02/02/2010 - 19:43.
Within both industry and academia, the pressures are very high to demonstrate productivity and relevance from one's research efforts. In these difficult times, the limited funding from granting agencies is primarily for hypothesis-driven research. Consequently, it is not surprising if research biases exist in publications arising from universities and research institutes any more than from industry. At Kinexus Bioinformatic Corporation, the integrity of our scientific results is just as important for our internal research programs as for our academic and industrial clients. In the spirit of promoting scientific research, we have made most of our experimental results freely accessible to the scientific community through on-line databases. I know of several other companies that have similarly made large data sets available. As our research is discovery-based rather than hypothesis-driven, there is no need nor incentive for promoting any personal biases or agendas. As more academic and industrial research laboratories adopt systems biology approaches, it should become less of an issue who is funding the research, but what fascinating results emerge from these efforts.
Link to the original blog post
Within both industry and academia, the pressures are very high to demonstrate productivity and relevance from one's research efforts. In these difficult times, the limited funding from granting agencies is primarily for hypothesis-driven research. Consequently, it is not surprising if research biases exist in publications arising from universities and research institutes any more than from industry. At Kinexus Bioinformatic Corporation, the integrity of our scientific results is just as important for our internal research programs as for our academic and industrial clients. In the spirit of promoting scientific research, we have made most of our experimental results freely accessible to the scientific community through on-line databases. I know of several other companies that have similarly made large data sets available. As our research is discovery-based rather than hypothesis-driven, there is no need nor incentive for promoting any personal biases or agendas. As more academic and industrial research laboratories adopt systems biology approaches, it should become less of an issue who is funding the research, but what fascinating results emerge from these efforts.
Link to the original blog post