The seven deadly curs’d sins … Avarice

You must have surely seen that our good friend Dr C. Quince, has been given yet another huge grant from The Thanatology Foundation for a large project to find human genes for avarice and venality. The factories keep on multiplying and growing and I hope you are never tempted to acquire a dark, satanic mill of your own and join the band of new alchemists who turn gold into base pairs. Some historian of science will observe that during the 20th century, scientific research became industrialized, first in physics and then in biology. We changed from cottage weaving to textile manufacture. Some scientists discovered that owning the means of production was better than owning the product, because they got everything that way. You will remember that this is what Karl Marx was not happy about in society and his recommendation was that this ownership be taken away from the small minority and given to the proletariat —something, I think, that may not be too far from the thoughts of our present scientific working class. Perhaps we would be better off modelling ourselves on feudal Japan, where the peasants always owned the land but the lords owned the produce and therefore needed a samurai class to defend their acquisitions from other predatory lords and to indulge in predations of their own. Of course, to achieve a balanced ecological system, they had to ensure that they did not kill too many peasants or destroy too much land in the course of their activities. Could research fit this mould? It is easy to see the lords walking off with the produce, taking all the results and publishing them, because this is what they do today. But it is harder to find a plausible basis for the ownership by students and postdocs of all the labs, chemicals, clones, computers, etc. And who would be the samurai, helping one lord to take over another department? The industrialization of scientific research has gone hand in hand with the transfer of the science to industry. Until the late 1970s everybody thought that molecular biology was not only useless but dangerous, but with the development of the biotechnology industry following advances in DNA cloning and sequencing, everything changed. There appeared on the scene venture capitalists, who set up companies to pursue the commercialization of the new biology. For the first time, scientists encountered avarice in its purest form. …