[UncleOxidant]

Is there anything new here, though? Science is and always has been a human endeavor - it didn't arrive out of the sky delivered to us by gods or aliens. There have always been "regulatory failures (since we've had regulations, anyway), moral failures and outright abuses pushed in the guise of scientific expertise." this is nothing new.

[cuspy]

Right, but what's your point? If it's an old problem we shouldn't try to address it? I think the evidence points to it getting worse and more importantly becoming more and more of a liability for our future ability to compete on the world stage.

[UncleOxidant]

I'm not completely convinced that it's getting worse (that was my point), but if it is getting worse then we should try to figure out what changed. Maybe it's the drive for Universities to profit off of their research due to less public funding? If we think of the example of Jonas Salk and the the polio vaccine he developed he didn't want to make any money off of it - he essentially gave it away. Maybe we've developed into more of a dog-eat-dog, every-man-for-himself society in general where you've got to get as much as you can else you might end up on the streets? I don't know, but if the problem is indeed worse then maybe those are a couple of reasons.