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Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science 1st Edition
This trenchant study analyzes the rise and decline in the quality and format of science in America since World War II.
During the Cold War, the U.S. government amply funded basic research in science and medicine. Starting in the 1980s, however, this support began to decline and for-profit corporations became the largest funders of research. Philip Mirowski argues that a powerful neoliberal ideology promoted a radically different view of knowledge and discovery: the fruits of scientific investigation are not a public good that should be freely available to all, but are commodities that could be monetized.
Consequently, patent and intellectual property laws were greatly strengthened, universities demanded patents on the discoveries of their faculty, information sharing among researchers was impeded, and the line between universities and corporations began to blur. At the same time, corporations shed their in-house research laboratories, contracting with independent firms both in the States and abroad to supply new products. Among such firms were AT&T and IBM, whose outstanding research laboratories during much of the twentieth century produced Nobel Prize–winning work in chemistry and physics, ranging from the transistor to superconductivity.
Science-Mart offers a provocative, learned, and timely critique, of interest to anyone concerned that American science―once the envy of the world―must be more than just another way to make money.
- ISBN-100674046463
- ISBN-13978-0674046467
- Edition1st
- PublisherHarvard University Press
- Publication dateApril 1, 2011
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions6.42 x 1.42 x 9.36 inches
- Print length464 pages
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Historian and economist Mirowski presents a thoroughly researched and sure-to-be-controversial view of the economic and political influences on science policy in post-WW II America. The author traces the commoditization of science in the US―a shift from the Cold War funding by government and military entities to the present dominance of funding by for-profit corporations―making modern American science just another product in the mammoth economy.”―T. Timmons, Choice
“Eminently thought-provoking, this book places the contemporary economics of science in a context that combines political economy and intellectual history. A deeply impressive work that contributes to crucial debates. Mirowski never shies away from controversy and presents his case clearly and persuasively in an effective, engaging, and humorous style.”―Donald MacKenzie, author of An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets
“Science-Mart is timely and important in a sense that goes beyond a specialist contribution. Mirowski’s wide-ranging research addresses a dazzling array of topics, which he situates historically and fuses into a compelling critique that will fascinate any reader concerned with the economic and social dimensions of modern science and technology.”―Theodore M. Porter, author of Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age
Review
-- Sheldon Krimsky American Scientist
Historian and economist Mirowski presents a thoroughly researched and sure-to-be-controversial view of the economic and political influences on science policy in post-WW II America. The author traces the commoditization of science in the US―a shift from the Cold War funding by government and military entities to the present dominance of funding by for-profit corporations―making modern American science just another product in the mammoth economy.
-- T. Timmons Choice
Eminently thought-provoking, this book places the contemporary economics of science in a context that combines political economy and intellectual history. A deeply impressive work that contributes to crucial debates. Mirowski never shies away from controversy and presents his case clearly and persuasively in an effective, engaging, and humorous style.
-- Donald MacKenzie, author of An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets
Science-Mart is timely and important in a sense that goes beyond a specialist contribution. Mirowski’s wide-ranging research addresses a dazzling array of topics, which he situates historically and fuses into a compelling critique that will fascinate any reader concerned with the economic and social dimensions of modern science and technology.
-- Theodore M. Porter, author of Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Harvard University Press; 1st edition (April 1, 2011)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 464 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0674046463
- ISBN-13 : 978-0674046467
- Item Weight : 2.01 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.42 x 1.42 x 9.36 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,895,387 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5,417 in Economic History (Books)
- #9,965 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)
- #77,869 in World History (Books)
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But there's another puzzle: why is that Harvard University (who published Science-Mart and wonderfully hold the copyright to his book, rather than the author - another neoliberal triumph) didn't encourage him to expunge the last section of his book, which is a concise but devastating account of a deeply unsavoury story of `conflict of interest' that resulted in Harvard losing Larry Summers as Harvard president, having to fork out $26m to the USA government in settlement, and keeping the full story under wraps, presumably indefinitely? I can't decide whether this is irony, oversight, or Harvard asserting in the face of quite a lot of evidence the primacy of academic individuality.
It's still a tough read, but much more rewarding for the general reader than Never let a serious crisis go to waste. Mirowski still occasionally disconnects his ultra-academic thought module and allows it to wander around while it independently generates impenetrable sentences, but they fortunately don't usually impede the broad flow (I would recommend, however, that he makes a concession to the intelligent general reader by providing a reference glossary of terms, especially the named legislation which is a relatively unknown territory for non-USA readers (eg Bayh-Dole Act etc)).
In short, Science-Mart explains the omnipervasiveness of the neoliberal thought collective, as Mirowski calls it, in the field of science policy. Since the 1980s, it's resulted in schizoid universities aiming feebly to emulate their privatised equivalents, thus further encouraging (like it needs encouragement) the neoliberal aim of reducing universities to minimum-wage piece-rate on-line teaching factories that generate citations that nobody can see because the journals are held in closed access by the mega-publishers who charge $35 a go to download a feeble 3 page re-hashed review of reviews to up the citation index of professors. There is also a shocking neoconservative regime of self-serving regulation (especially, as he reports in detail, MTAs (material transfer agreements)), bargain basement medical research that outsourced and offshored clinical research organisations (CROs) have taken over from academic hospitals in order to get results quickly (and to withhold them from public scrutiny if they don't deliver the pre-determined goods to their pharma masters), and, although the evidence base is frustratingly tenuous, a degradation of the quality of pre-emptive and spoiling patents - and most shamefully, probably a fall in academic standards in publishing, where quantity of output, multiple, ghost and gift authorship are more in evidence than originality. In the UK, the same arguments have been made for general higher education by Stefan Collini, who emphasises the baleful effect of the Research Assessment Exercise (now renamed in characteristically mendacious neoliberal fashion the Research Excellence Framework) on university research (Collini's magisterial prose and Mirowski's command of data and statistics would make a formidable transatlantic writing team). He doesn't, of course, have much to say in favour of just-in-time clinical research that disengages patients from their clinicians, the bibliometric citation industries, the strangulating effect of intellectual property on academic discourse, or the poster-boy of neoliberal science, the biotech start-ups that have thoroughly compromised many academics and their institutions, have made almost no money for anyone, and have made feeble inroads into therapeutics for most of the diseases that kill the world's population - yet are still considered by the general public to hold the key to eternal life, partly because of sexy PR exercises such as the Human Genome Project (Mirowski tells this story in revelatory detail).
Mirowski doesn't even hint at palliatives or restoratives - because there aren't any. The neoliberal agenda crept up on us mostly unawares, surrounded by a miasma of talk of `reform', `modernisation', `agendas for change' - unlimited trashy neospeak that's locked its positive memes into our lives. With barely a pause for breath after the 2008 crash the neoliberal agenda is up and running as strong as ever, even more iron-plated against any further opportunity placed in its way. We could individually and as professions, though, put some kind of brake on its growth, by not wholly capitulating to the apparent universality of neoliberalism: in my own field of medicine, Mirowski reminds us that in 2002 the pre-eminent world journal of general medicine, The New England Journal of Medicine, revoked its decision preventing authors of review articles having drug company ties, purportedly because they could no longer find commentators truly independent of the drug companies whose studies they were critiquing. I would respectfully suggest to the Massachusetts Medical Society they try again, but a little harder this time, and with rather more urgency. Ten more years and it will assuredly be too late: there truly will be no independent thinkers left.
