New Scientist - 21.09.2019

21 September 2019 | New Scientist | 19

The Massachusetts Institute of

Technology Media Lab isn’t the

only place to have accepted

donations from sources that

some consider inappropriate

(see main story).

The London School of

Economics came under fire

in 2011 for accepting money

from a foundation run by

Libyan dictator Muammar

Gaddafi.

In the same year, the

University of California, Los

Angeles, accepted $10 million

from Lowell Milken to set up a

business law institute.

He had been indicted for

racketeering and fraud.

New York’s Metropolitan

Museum of Art has a wing

named after the Sackler family,

who own Purdue Pharma,

which has been accused of

stoking the opioid crisis in the

US. The museum said in May

that it would stop accepting

donations from the family.

Many other places have

financial links to the family

too, including an imaging

laboratory at London’s

Natural History Museum.

Money trouble

▲ Vegemite flies

A balloon has carried

two slices of Vegemite

on toast 100 kilometres

into the atmosphere.

Your move, Marmite.

▲ Superbolts

We now know that

lightning bolts that are

1000 times stronger

than average mainly

strike at sea, particularly

at a hotspot near Japan.

▲ Moon elevator

A cable tethered to the

moon rather than to Earth

could be a more feasible

way of building a space

elevator to our nearest

neighbour.

▼ Nappy changer

An inventor who patented

an “automatic nappy

changer” has won an

Ig Nobel prize. Who wants

to put their child in first?

▼ A load of dung

A story about an Inuit man

who made a knife from

his frozen faeces may not

be entirely true. When

ethnographers made one,

the blade melted when

they tried cutting meat.

“When a scandal comes along,

as it does periodically, institutions

respond to that in a scramble

and maybe set their own

principles for what funding

they’ll accept,” he says.

It is also clear that not all

scientific funding is suspect, says

James Wilsdon at the University

of Sheffield, UK. Public funding is

well regulated. And many private

donations are directed towards

specific research or particular

labs, which often makes the

expectations clear.

The problem lies elsewhere,

when money is donated to

particular teams or institutions

without a stipulated goal or aim.

“Shovelling money into this grey

space that exists above individuals

and specific projects makes it

possible not to see the fingerprint

of that funding,” says Wilsdon.

One reasonable way to

encourage transparency around

this type of funding, says Wilsdon,

could be to legally require all

donations to research institutions

to be made public if they are over

a certain amount. This approach

already exists in politics, so we

know it is workable.

One thing is sure: these

questions aren’t going away.

And it is probably going to be

prestigious labs that face them

most often. On the one hand, they

are a magnet for rich individuals

looking to make a statement.

On the other, they already have

enough money to carry out due

diligence. “It should be easier for

them to say no,” says Flanagan. ❚

The code says universities

should create an ethics committee

that includes representatives

of students, staff and the local

community, and that this should

vet every source of funding.

John Wakeford at the Missenden

Centre near High Wycombe, UK,

worked with Daly on the code.

He says the idea was well received

by ethicists, but university funding

offices didn’t widely adopt it.

A 2011 seminar for university

development officers to discuss

funding ethics garnered interest

from only two people, he says.

The inclusion of staff and

students on such a panel could

alleviate funding concerns before

they turn into a fiasco, says

Wakeford. Without this kind

of transparency, universities

can put their staff in unethical

positions without their consent.

That was true for Ethan

Zuckerman of the Media Lab.

He was unaware that the lab had

received funding from Epstein,

and resigned in protest when

he found out. In a blog post,

he wrote that his work focused

on social justice and that it was

“hard to do that work with a

straight face” in a place that had

worked with Epstein.

However, a Missenden-style

committee wouldn’t necessarily

have helped in the MIT case,

because Ito concealed where the

money came from. A committee

can’t vet donations it doesn’t

know about.

Does this mean that we need

a regulatory body with sharp

teeth to force all donations to

science into the light of day?

We may not need to go that far.

Kieron Flanagan at the University

of Manchester, UK, says that

autonomy is baked into the

principles guiding universities

and that this scandal may well

prompt them to revisit their rules.

Working

hypothesis

Sorting the week’s

supernovae from the

absolute zeros

GETTY IMAGES/ALAMY

More Insight online

Your guide to a rapidly changing world

newscientist.com/insight

with strings attached. “Scientists
have not been great at talking
about the conflicts of interest
that come with that,” he says.
There is no commonly adopted
ethical framework to guide these
decisions, although some have
tried to create one. One attempt
is the Missenden Code of Practice
for Ethics and Accountability,
developed by Rory Daly who is
now at Lancaster University, UK.

$10m

Amount donated to the University

of California, Los Angeles, by

someone indicted for fraud