Author of the week: Daniel S. Greenberg

last updated 8 January 2015

Journalist Daniel Greenberg thinks he knows why so many scientists spend their time producing useless studies, said Nicholas Wade in The New York Times. In Tech Transfer, Greenberg’s “hilarious” first foray into fiction, the former Science magazine editor offers a scathing portrait of how greed trumps the pursuit of knowledge in most of the scientific research being conducted in our universities. At Greenberg’s fictional Kershaw University, the laboratories are stuffed with “scientific entrepreneurs who have learned how to absorb federal funds, suppress charges of malfeasance, and live high off the hog.”

The plot of the novel plays as farce, but Greenberg insists that the corruption he depicts is no exaggeration, said Serena Golden in Inside Higher Education. He believes that just as at Kershaw, much of the research being done at today’s universities is riddled with conflicts of interest and is useless to anybody except the scientists being paid to do it. Well, the scientists plus a few wily venture capitalists and a handful of status-seeking private benefactors. “The general plot is taken from real life,” Greenberg says. “I mean, I’ve talked to a couple of hundred university professors, and I know that this is reality.” Policymakers in Washington, he says, could clean up the mess tomorrow if they stopped research funding to all universities except the 10 or 20 that consistently produce the most useful work. “Nibbling around the edges” won’t do it, he says.