WHO IS KIDDING WHOM ABOUT RESEARCH?

Abstract

In the competition for funds, medical research has an advantage over many other fields in claiming that its goal is...to prevent human suffering and premature death from disease. We like to think this is our goal, but if this were the real intention of researchers, they would be better advised to divert the funds to the easily curable health care needs of the Third World, or even the inner cities of the First. In fact, most researchers have no real goal beyond what may be termed an unquenchable desire to understand. It is the need for money to reach the goals that drives the rhetoric of "saving humankind." The increasing commercialization of research is responsible not only for making secrecy more common, but also for the misleading inflation of the end results of medical research.