Douglas Sipp, of the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research in Kobe, Japan, will present in the HSB Seminar Series Wednesday, March 13 from 10:00-11:00 AM. The talk will take place in COHS Room 3130, UCI Health Sciences Complex, 856 Health Sciences Quad. Sipp’s presentation is entitled, “Science has a billionaire Problem.” The abstract for Sipp’s presentation states, “In 2021, an opinion article in Science reported that the share of basic research funding in the US provided by family foundations and individual donors had risen to 42%. This increased reliance on direct and indirect support from wealthy patrons mirrors longer trajectories in other disciplines. In 2008, 15% of accredited medical schools in the US had adopted a donor’s name; by 2022, this had risen to 31%. Access to private donor funds can make a significant positive impact in areas of research in which public funds are insufficient or encumbered by political concerns, or cannot be used at all. But the shift to increased dependence on private donations has potentially serious negative consequences as well. Looking at recent trends and developments in the private funding of stem cell R&D, I explore how the private turn has led to reputational risks for institutions and individual scientists, the skewing of research priorities, undermining of regulatory oversight, and potential deleterious effects on public views of scientific conduct and priorities. Stem cell research and adjacent fields, with their immediate implications for the study of human reproduction, development, and longevity, have attracted the attention of an unusually large and diverse array of wealthy donors, yielding decidedly mixed outcomes. I conclude by examining how the stem cell experience of private funding may serve as a bellwether for the scientific enterprise in general.”
Douglas Sipp’s expertise is in the areas of health ethics, science policy, and the regulation of stem cell-based medical interventions. His scholarship addresses such topics as the role private sources of funding can play in skewing research priorities, ethical issues and policy challenges in the clinical translation of stem cell-based medical products, scientific and normative problems with pay-to-participate clinical studies, ethical dimensions of direct-to-consumer marketing of unproven stem cell interventions, and the importance of responsible, non-hyperbolic public communication of scientific research.