Panel I

Remarks by Alan Hartford, Massachusetts General Hospital

Delivered at MIT, Cambridge, MA, March 29, 1999.

What I’d like to present to you today are a few results from a survey that was done back in 1994-1995, primarily, through the auspices of David Blumenthal who is a professor of medicine and health policy at Massachusetts General Hospital, as well as through Karen Seashore-Louis’s group at the University of Minnesota and others at the University of Massachusetts. I had the privilege of working with David for a year finishing up my Ph.D. dissertation. I’m not going to burden you with all the material that came out of that work, but I would like to focus our attention on a couple of aspects that I think will be relevant to the discussion.

The study itself--let me tell you a little about it--characterizes the current extent of academic-industry relationships, particularly among biomedical scientists. The way it did that was to perform two surveys, one of the biotechnology industry and one of individual biomedical scientists in the top fifty NIH research funded institutions in the United States. We will focus on the latter survey. It was a random sample of both clinical and non-clinical departments that included 4,000 life science researchers who were surveyed between October of 1994 and April of 1995. Of those 4,000, several were inelligible and there was an over-sampling of genetics researchers who were excluded from our analysis. Of the remaining 3,159 elligible, there were a total of 2,152 who actually returned the long questionnaires that extended fourteen or fifteen pages. That’s a response rate of 65%. It’s quite high and testifies to how important the respondents actually felt the information was that they were furnishing.

The survey included faculty characteristics, their attitudes toward industry relationships, the actual nature and extent of their relationships with industry, and more personal and professional data. We have been posed the question: is this a big problem or a little problem? What we found was--well, while some might argue whether it’s a problem, there’s no question, it is certainly quite big. 64%, nearly two-thirds of the surveyed faculty, had some form of current relationship with industry. That includes money for research, consulting relationships, involvement in products, involvement in the management of companies, and also receiving major gifts from industry. About one quarter of the surveyed faculty currently receive research support from industry. Those who do receive research support on average receive 40% of their research funding from industry. 20% reported salary supplementations from industry. Of those who receive salary supplementations, 13% of their salary come from industry.

Some of this data have already been published. David Blumenthal’s article in a 1996 New England Journal of Medicine gave an overview of the study. It found that 15% of faculty with industry relationships reported participating in trade secrets, and faculty with industry relationships had more interest in commercial pursuits. Those with more than two-thirds of their research support from industry reported fewer publications. That wasn’t a quality performance trade-off; rather their publications scored lower in terms of overall influence levels—in other words, overall quality level of the journals in which they were publishing was lower, and they were publishing less!

In 1997, Blumenthal published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association on secrecy. Overall in this study he found that scientists with industry relationships more frequently report delaying or withholding publication of their data. And this is also what we found. Scientists’ attitudes toward industry relationships do in fact reflect the extent of their relationships with industry—no surprise. But what’s very interesting is that a scientist’s subjective perception of the importance of industry funding in continuing that scientist’s career is more influential on attitudes and behaviors than is the actual extent, the actual dollar amount, of the financial relationship with industry. In other words, measuring dollar amounts as a percentage of the research budget or salary, it’s the perception of the importance of industry support to the scientist’s continuing a career which has greater influence on his behaviors than does the actual amount of money the scientist receives from industry.

We found that personal and professional considerations surrounding industry funding affect issues of withholding or delaying publication—in short, the release of research results. There are two parts to this issue of releasing data. One is the actual signing of an agreement, ceding control, ceding actual property rights to the results of research. The other is the question of the actual release of the data: whether the scientist withholds or delays publication of results for some period of time. Overall in the sample, 18% of scientists had signed a nondisclosure agreement. If you look at the various factors underlying that, we found that factors that weren’t important were whether a scientist perceived industry funding as important to his career, the potential commercial applications of the project, or even the extent of the scientist’s research funding or income coming from industry. What we did find important for predicting this behavior was the existence of the availability of industry funding, whether the scientist was receiving some research funding from industry regardless of motivation or need. In short, it is not an issue of scientists signing a nondisclosure agreement because of some kind of personal quid pro quo or personal interest, rather it appears that they sign these agreements simply because the funding is available.

From a policy perspective, what’s important is that, once the agreement is signed, this does affect the scientist’s ability or inclination to publish. There was a group of scientists, 20% of the sample, who reported actually not publishing or delaying publication for more than six months because of proprietary reasons. We identified three factors as predictive of such withholding behavior. First was the existence of a nondisclosure agreement. Second was the scientist perceiving industry funding as important in continuing his research career, that eclipsed, totally washed out, the influence of the actual objective financial extent of research funding. Third, those scientists who saw commercializability as important, that is to say if they chose their research topics on the likelihood of that topic being commercially applicable in some way, such scientists were more likely to delay or withhold publication.

Now that last factor influencing the scientist’s withholding behavior, his interest in the commercial application of research results, that sounds as though the scientist is very entrepreneurial, as though he is trying to find research topics from which he may profit in some way or another. If you look at the data, though, I think that’s the wrong interpretation of that particular question. Concerning scientists’ attitudes toward industry on fifteen separate dimensions, there were two that were directly relevant to scientists’ financial well-being: "To what extent do you perceive industry funding or industry involvment as important to salary increases for involved scientists." The other question was: "To what extent do you see industry relationships as important to tenure decisions for involved scientists." For the most part, these two questions were very difficult to relate to industry involvement. But, for the group of scientists that chose their topics on the basis of commercial applications, these scientists consistently perceived salary increases and tenure decisions as being related directly to the extent of their industry involvement. So, in short, some scientists may get involved in commercially applicable topics because they see favorable salary and tenure decisions as arising from their ability to generate projects with commercial applications. The implication of this is that it appears that this is not simply a personal issue for these scientists; it is much more institutional in nature. It is the universities, the academic centers, which in some instances are encouraging and rewarding scientists for pursuing commercial projects.

This goes back to the question of incentives. What is happening is that a system is evolving, a system of incentives whereby universities are increasingly relying on industry funding. More funding can bring about new and important scientific research in its wake. But at the same time we have to be careful that the universities do not forget their missions. The incentives they create for their scientists can, will, and do affect the scientists’ attitudes and their behavior. This can change the very nature, the bedrock, of the practice of scientific research in this country. It is the mission of our academic centers to preserve and protect the foundations of our scientific knowledge.

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