Science in search of truth or profits?

Long back in 1950s, the British scientist turned Indian national, Dr. J.B.S. Haldara, a renowned statistician wrote about intellectuals (including scientists) of developing countries. He stated that they were worse than the business man so far as the exploitation was concerned. The validity of it is verified time and again. The latest case is that of Bt-Brinjal controversy. After a month's exercise of assessing public opinion on the desirability of introducing US Company Monsanto's Bt-Brinjal in India, Minister of State for Environment and Forest, Jai Ram Ramesh declared, on February 9, a moratorium on the introduction of Bt-Brinjal for commercial use in the country. The very next day, articles by scientists highlighting the benefits of Bt_Brijnal were published on the first pages of some news papers. No doubt, they were paid articles sponsored by the company. This process of scientific propagenda will be continued during the whole moratorium period to build the public opinion in support of Monsanto's Bt-Brinjal. This is not the new development. Four year back, Monsanto had applied for license for its Bt-Cotton to Environment Approval Committee (EAC) though the company had already distributed its Bt-Cotton seeds illegally to farmers who had grown its crop and the crop was in the flowering stage. Just a day before the EAC meeting, Monsanto got a scientific article written by two scientists published in a Delhi news paper which started with these sentences: 'when your daughter has become pregnant, you have no choice but to get her married.' The message was clear and the EAC gave its approval to BT-Cotton. In fact, the Gujarat farmers, who had sown BT-Cotton were on the agitation path on hearing the news that if the Monsanto's application for seeking Bt-Cotton approval was rejected, their cotton crop would be burnt down. Another field where science is blatantly used for profit making at the cost of human health and well-being of the society is the pharmaceuticals field. It is well known that multinational drug companies increase exhorbitantly the price of their drugs justifying it by saying that they have to spend a lot of money on the research. But the fact is that the major part of their research budget is spent not on the scientific research but on the market research. Just to cite one example, the US drug multinational Merck spent millions and millions of dollars in its propaganda for its medicine Vioxx to treat knees pain and earned billions of dollars, but it turned out that Vioxx killed 60,000 people due to heart attack caused by this drug. Paying huge bribes to doctors and spending huge amount of money on media publicity, drug companies are playing with the health of people Why is it that science, whose sole aim is to search the truth, is being used on a very large scale for profit making ignoring social responsibility? The main reason is that funding of scientific research is shifted from public to private sector. Giant multinationals are funding science projects and one who pays, play the pipe.