The Implicit Manipulations Of Science By Human Greed

There is a massive dissonance between the quest for knowledge and its sources of funding. But what gives rise to that dissonance?

The definition of science on Study.com is as follows:

Science is the study of the physical and natural world through observations and experiments. Science is all around us. Right now, the fact that you exist and are in the process of reading this lesson is science. The process of creating the air we breathe — also science. The food we enjoy, water we drink, and clothes we wear are all based in science. Looking up into the atmosphere gives us a glimpse into astronomy, another branch of science. You can’t get around it. Science is everywhere and is one of the most important topics of study in our world.

Science is on a quest for the constant development of new knowledge. Without the scientific knowledge behind how electrons flow, we would not have been able to manipulate that to harness the usefulness of electricity.

(Of course, without the scientific knowledge behind how neutrons can affect radioactive isotopes, we would not have been able to manipulate that to harness the destructive power of the atomic bombs that were used during World War II, either).

Understanding the key principles behind a scientific process at work is one thing. We would then have to manipulate/regulate/control that to achieve a desired outcome.

And then, from a business mindset, we do have to market and sell it so that we can earn a financial reward from dedicating that much of our time to understanding those principles.

And therein lies the problem of opportunity cost

But that’s the problem: because there is so much in the world that we don’t know, then what do we focus on? Anything that has not been discovered is fair game, but it comes at an opportunity cost.

As it is mentioned in Investopedia,

Opportunity costs represent the potential benefits an individual, investor, or business misses out on when choosing one alternative over another. The idea of opportunity costs is a major concept in economics.

When we are on a quest for pure knowledge, we are able to put our minds to study just about anything that we want.

However, we do need to eat. We do need something that can support our survival on this earth. Research work, like any other kind of work, isn’t exactly free of charge. The major scientific laboratories in universities around the world do have a whole range of expensive scientific and technical equipment that are able to perform tasks that lay people don’t even really understand or know of.

The researchers don’t fund themselves or their equipment — a large chunk of research funding comes from private corporations, who do impose their own biases and expectations on what they want the researchers to do, in exchange for research funding.

There is, therefore, an opportunity cost to whatever a person does research on. When they’re focusing on a certain aspect in a certain field, they cannot focus that much on alternative aspects at all. They would have to miss out on what those alternative aspects hold, especially given the tight deadlines that the private corporations add in — they do want to see a return on their investments, and that is especially prevalent in medical research.

The philosophy behind finding scientific answers leans heavily on where the money comes from, and that philosophy makes it difficult for the researcher to accept contrary viewpoints that will run against their hypothesis.

However, the methodology behind conducting the research ought to be rigorous, thorough and fair.

Medical research and drug discovery

In The Dissonance Between Medical Research And Human Health, I do highlight that the style of research that is adopted by most researchers today is incremental. The idea is to keep on building up a body of work related to a certain specific topic.

For example, if I were to be doing cardiology research, I could focus extensively on cholesterol buildups in arteries and cardiovascular disease. I could map out the entire sequence of events that are propagated by different biomolecules and cells in our body, and then develop solutions towards preventing specific steps from occurring.

These “solutions” are chemicals that are foreign to our body, which we term as “medications” or “drugs”.

Much work has to be done to develop that initial understanding behind the entire pathway. We can see the pathway to cholesterol synthesis here, and it ain’t that easy to understand. There are so many steps there that will confuse most people.

What we do need to know is that the rate limiting (or the slowest) step in all these steps is the synthesis of mevalonate.

How, then, do we stop the synthesis of cholesterol? We target the mevalonate step.

And that’s exactly what statin medications were designed to do.

And that’s why statin drugs are being marketed for people with high cholesterol issues. It’s a big cash cow, by the way (Now Seriously, What’s So Tricky About Cholesterol?).

Of course, when the focus is on that teensy weensy bite sized mevalonate step, we will end up ignoring the big picture. Even when the methodology behind developing the cholesterol synthesis mechanisms are completely accurate.

The big picture encompasses the dynamic balance of cholesterol in our body — how does it enter our body, and how does it leave our body?

In Methods For Waste Elimination From Our Body, I discuss how the liver processes waste cholesterol into bile salts and dumps it into the intestines for faecal elimination. If a person isn’t moving their poop out frequently and regularly enough, the faecal matter stays within the semi-permeable intestines longer. The bile salts can be reabsorbed back into the blood. Would this re-absorption not promote the accumulation of cholesterol within our blood, then?

Of course, the elimination channels are rarely discussed in medical research, because that isn’t what the pharmaceutical companies are looking out for, is it? Even when there is that glaring evidence that 95% of the American population simply does not consume sufficient dietary fibre.

Unfortunately, when the bias towards drug development and drug discovery is so high, fuelled further by the prospects of potential economic and financial gains, other alternatives will have to be sacrificed for those corporate gains. Especially when statins were a huge cash cow for Pfizer, Inc.

And that analysis can be applied towards other drugs too.

The issue isn’t about science now; it’s about human greed.

Climate change and the environment

Drew Costley wrote in Just Stopping Emissions May No Longer Be Enough to Stop Global Warming that:

no matter how much we reduce emissions now, warming will continue, and the self-sustained melting of Arctic ice and permafrost that has already begun could continue for 500 years.

I previously did my PhD in carbon dioxide capture processes, and graduated with a heavy tinge of cynicism in my mind.

Why?

Because I reasoned that no matter how efficient I made a carbon capture process out to be, some manufacturer out there will design a new product that will contribute to more emissions, putting the pressure on me to make my capture process even more efficient.

I didn’t really like that idea.

The main premise behind developing carbon capture processes is like cleaning up after a spoilt brat who cannot take care of himself/herself — I would need to keep cleaning and cleaning, rather than change the spoilt brat’s behavioural patterns. Parents, you know how annoying that can be, especially when you have to clean up messes that you didn’t create.

In the same vein, that’s what carbon capture processes do.

Because the laws of economics and financial gain dictate that we do need to indulge in constructing newer skyscrapers with proper air-conditioning, manufacture more iPhones, and jet about for sightseeing purposes.

We’re abetting the spoilt brat behaviour that is fuelled by consumption.

Mainly because we want to reap the economic profits out of it.

We then pay lip service to the whole Amazon rainforest issue by planting more trees.

There is only one problem — trees don’t grow on demand.

We can’t shovel fistfuls of dollars into the earth and tell the trees to accelerate their growth processes just so that they can start to take in more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, can we?

We’d therefore have to develop more aggressive carbon capture processes. The problem there is that the most commonly used carbon capture process in industrial plants makes use of solvent absorption, where carbon dioxide is absorbed into a monoethanolamine solvent (I wrote a scientific journal review article about that here in 2015). The regeneration of the monoethanolamine solvent for further reuse, however, is energy intensive and can contribute to up to 80% of the total energy requirements for the plant…

We’re back to Square One.

The elephant in the room that nobody wants to address is the fact that we ought to be cutting down our consumption.

But consumption drives profits, so that’s not going to happen any time soon.

One other irony that I found in climate science — scientists would have been jetting about worldwide (pre-COVID) to present their findings at global conventions that somehow did make use of a large convention centre space as well as a ton of energy devoted to air conditioning, which does further worsen the whole “global warming” issue. It did make me wonder: if I were to have become a climate scientist, wouldn’t I be going exactly against the philosophy of “saving the world”?

So again, it really isn’t about saving the world — but what economic or financial gains are there for me if I were to project myself as “environmentally friendly”? It’s a greedy and selfish mentality indeed.

In conclusion

That’s just two aspects of life that we’re looking at: the environment and human health. There are many other areas where the tenets of science have been manipulated for human greed.

Because, unfortunately, moral ethics aren’t really advancing at the same rate as technological advances. We can’t expect science to be completely unbiased in its philosophy, but we ought to expect that the methodology of doing scientific research must be unbiased.

I’m planning to expand this article further into an ebook in due time.

Stay tuned for it when it comes out by subscribing to my mailing list for the latest updates!

Joel Yong, PhD, is a biochemical engineer/scientist, an educator and a writer. He has authored 4 ebooks (available on Amazon.com in Kindle format) and co-authored 6 journal articles in internationally peer-reviewed scientific journals. His main focus is on finding out the fundamentals of biochemical mechanisms in the body that the doctors don’t educate the lay people about, and will then proceed to deconstruct them for your understanding — as an educator should.