Daniel S. Greenberg is a seasoned science journalist who has been reporting on research and industrial science for over forty years. In Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism, Greenberg explores the web of relationships among academic science, private industry, and government.
The primary strength of Greenberg’s approach to this question is his journalist’s ability to tell colorful stories, often based on personal interviews with key players, which elucidate both individual personalities and big questions. For example, Greenberg has Drummond Rennie, an activist and editor of prestigious medical journals, explain a key problem in scientific publishing: “’What we’re talking about . . . is the influence of money on research that my journal and other journals publish. The distorting influence of it. And this distorting influence is huge.’” This sort of first-hand testimony – and there is much of it in this book – is a powerful indictment of the supposed Mertonian neutrality of academic-industrial-government science.
The primary strength of Greenberg’s book, alas, is also a major weakness. Very often, the book reads like a string of tedious, unending anecdotes and quotations lacking a cohesive vision for reform – which is a fair description of the book as a whole. In a very brief concluding section on “Fixing the System,” Greenberg suggests “transparency” is the key to reform, but he never explains what this might mean. In a major omission, he does not examine at all whether “open access” publishing models might help push things towards greater transparency. Moreover, his dismissal of the Bayh-Dole Act and other legal developments that have encouraged universities to privatize their research through patent protection is so cursory that it flies by almost unnoticed. Yet the tension between “open” and “property” models of scientific research surely is both a driver and a symptom of the problems Greenberg exposes in his anecdotes and interviews.
On the whole, Science for Sale contains some useful source material for those who are interested in the sociology and business of institutional science in an age of money. It also will open the eyes of those who naively assert the neutrality of the scientific establishment. It does not, however, provide any meaningful proposals for reform.