Title: A Crisis of Trust: The University, Regulatory Science, and the Ethical Challenges of Our Time
The relationship between science, medicine, and politics has entered a crisis. For decades, regulatory agencies, biomedical research, and universities operated within a fragile equilibrium, marked by mistrust but sustained by a tacit social contract. Today, that balance is collapsing. The relative autonomy of universities to foster a “culture of critical discourse” is increasingly constrained by political interference. Subpoenas, investigations, and funding threats have placed admissions, curricula, and speech under scrutiny, turning one form of academic freedom against another. Meanwhile, the autonomy of basic science is eroding through deep cuts to agency budgets and the cancellation or freezing of funding for disfavored topics and institutions.
Why now, and why is biomedical research in the eye of the storm? This transformation reflects a longstanding crisis of mistrust in regulatory science and unresolved tensions in the social contract of science, accelerated and refracted by the coronavirus pandemic. Against this backdrop, Professor Eyal will consider three areas for intervention: revising the social contract of science to better reflect public health priorities, broadening participation in regulatory science to rebuild trust, and protecting academic freedom from political encroachment.
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