Do We Really Want Government-Controlled Science?

In 1999, Australian lawyer and journalist Paul Chadwick warned that, “All roads from a so-called independent statutory tribunal lead back through a parliament to a cabinet room”. Chadwick was speaking particularly of perennial issue of governments attempting to impose tighter control on media and information, but the same principle applies in every realm of public life.

Democracies must fight an eternal battle between authoritarianism and anarcy, too-minimalist laissez-faire and stifling over-regulation. Since at least the 1960s, and on steroids in the last five years, the scale has tipped disastrously to authoritarianism in everything from the media to public health.

Should we be wary of the same happening to science?

Australia must establish a watchdog to police its scientists, an inquiry into one of the country’s worst research misconduct scandals has found.

The proposed body would have the power to investigate allegations of research misconduct – such as falsifying data or running unethical experiments – and could directly sanction researchers found to have done the wrong thing.

The finding, by former South Australian Independent Commissioner Against Corruption Bruce Lander, increases pressure on the federal government to finally establish the equivalent of the United States’ Office of Research Integrity.

A review of the Australian Research Council – which the government is still considering – recommended it be given a legislated role in policing research misconduct.

I’ve reported several times on the worrisome levels of research misconduct, if not outright fraud, running through the sciences in Australia. This is just a part of a global, dirty secret of a crisis in science generally.

Australia currently allows research institutions to police their own scientists. Lander found this created a huge conflict of interest at the heart of the system.

“It is not necessarily in the institution’s best interests for it to become known that someone within the institution has engaged in research misconduct,” Lander said in a supplementary report released to this masthead.

“There is a real disincentive for an institution to investigate its own researchers.”

This is all true enough — but is the cure suggested here potentially worse than the disease?

Ian Freckelton, KC […] a barrister and a former judge of the Supreme Court in Nauru, wrote a book on research misconduct in 2019.

“The evidence for there being a problematic prevalence is overwhelming,” he said […]

Professor David Vaux, a leading scientific integrity campaigner, said the delay “showed that Australia is ill-equipped to handle concerns of possible research misconduct”.

“Looking at these [FOI] documents makes it even more clear that self-regulation by institutions does not work,” Vaux said.

But would government regulation be any better?

After all, we’ve seen only too well how easily scientists, especially fame-hungry wannabe celebrities, can become the all-too-eager lapdogs of over-controlling governments.

We’ve also seen how the United States’ Office of Research Integrity has done almost nothing to reign in certain rogue scientists. Whether stealing scientific secrets for China, funding dangerous research, or peddling wholesale lies as “The Science™”, government regulation seems to be almost as bad, if not infinitely worse, than self-regulation.

Remember: all roads from an “independent statutory tribunal” eventually wind their way back to government.

So, it becomes a question of whether we still trust governments, or not.