Corruption

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Corruption derives from the Latin verb corrumpere, which means to break into pieces, destroy, defraud, falsify, seduce, or bribe. But the meanings hardly end with those. They are merely one set of a procession of definitions and interpretations amassed over the centuries, all signifying some contagiously harmful, unjust, self-serving, often repulsive divergence from moral conduct.

Corruption defies and defiles what is generally perceived as the common good. In its malevolent extreme—such as systematic and widespread murder, torture, rape, or pillage, undertaken to maximize power—corruption can attain the dimensions of evil. At the lesser extreme, acts such as bribery, embezzlement, plagiarism, or falsifying research data, when done on a small scale and episodically, can be seen as unethical, immoral, or deranged, though not necessarily corrupt. Scope can often define corruption.

Science has its own literal definitions of corruption. Data are sometimes called corrupted. In biology, corruption is the process of living matter's decomposition. Similarly, a spoiled laboratory sample can likewise be described as having been corrupted. Terms such as rot, putrescence, and decay all serve well as descriptives for the revulsion corruption can generate. Corruption covers a multitude of sins and therefore has an almost limitless repertoire of baleful synonyms and colorful case examples.

Scholarship on corruption in science is rare, in technology (e.g., patent piracy, computer hacking) increasingly frequent. But scholarly work on corruption in governments, wherever they may be, is abundant. The challenge in the science and technology sector is to connect the hidden motivations and behavior patterns of those in the technical world to that of the political and economic spheres so that technical professionals can play stronger roles in perceiving their own relevance in stemming corruption's incessant growth.

A handful of organizations with ambitious programs to understand and prevent corruption have attempted to establish satisfactory definitions of corruption. The World Bank, which in 1999 launched a vigorous anti-corruption program, defines corruption as "the abuse of a public position for private gain." Transparency International, long the leading body in tracking and studying corruption, defines it as "behaviour on the part of officials in the public sector, whether politicians or civil servants, in which they improperly and unlawfully enrich themselves, or those close to them, by the misuse of the power entrusted to them." Because of the global trend toward the privatization of public functions, it extends that definition to abuses in the private sector.

A third body, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), shuns any attempt to define corruption but has undertaken considerable work in gathering statistics, convening conferences, and issuing reports on such subjects as bribery, export credits, corruption in individual countries, and corruption's impact on development.

Any generalized treatment of corruption that is less than criminal or evil can entail considerable subjective judgment, thus inviting both a self-critical eye and rhetorical reflection. Often the word is used loosely in tirades against political opponents, such as a "corrupt" policy by one political party or another involving the environment, the elderly, or illicit campaign tactics. Charges of corruption can be flung when scientists rally against the packing of technical panels by a government whose political party they oppose. In the brutal give and take of politics, judgments about corruption's severity and perhaps its very existence are best done with care, case by case, even item by item, with emotions held in tow.

Science, engineering, and technology—technology being the useful products of engineering—are themselves fertile soils for corruption. Under the thrust of technological change, they can serve as tools (genetic engineering, virology, the computer, and digital communications as examples) to expand the range of corruption's infectivity. Thus, right at the start, the technical world can be mired within conflicting goals when business, engineering, and science comingle. Not only that, but history displays the macabre paradox of science and engineering specifically employed for evil means such as the freezing of human beings by Nazi scientists to study the process of death and the feasibility of resuscitation, or the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932–1972) on prison inmates in Tuskegee, Alabama, as well as the radiation experiments performed on unwitting human subjects by the Atomic Energy Commission from 1944 to 1974. Further, it could easily be argued that weak implementation of occupational safety and health laws leading to worker deaths is also a form of corruption of the public good.

The values of science, which derive from philosophical and moral thought, are their own protection against any infestation of corruption. The inner character of science contains the ethical outcome of improving the lot of humankind and adhering to a strict code that imposes integrity on its practitioners. For years, the scientific community has striven to reduce the incidence of data falsification, arguing that the act of falsification erodes the honesty and openness that feeds scientific progress. Thus, science contains within itself a moral value all scientists are trained to revere. But, like other human beings, scientists can cheat, lie, and steal. The question is whether one chooses to call such flaws corruption—whether to expand the definition of corruption to include the corruption of values. At this moment in the sociology and psychology of science, divergent behavior in the technical fields rests in the discipline of ethics, broad enough in itself.

Thus, the tracking and policing of unethical behavior among technical professionals has been left to science and engineering societies, journals devoted to science/society issues and to the field of misconduct and malpractice, inspectors general for the technical agencies of government, the agencies themselves (through, for example, the Office of Research Integrity at the National Institutes of Health), and science and engineering workplaces. Corruption involving science and technology, however, does come in for significant treatment in the corruption literature because the capital transferred for development projects that involve science and engineering is often skimmed for payoffs at either the contractor or government level. Thus it is clear that those within the science and engineering community whose work engages them in development projects have a stake in corruption at the level of the Third World. Whistleblowing is one major response by technical people to perceived violations of ethical practice among their higher-ups. Unfortunately, whistle-blowers are too infrequently rewarded—and often punished—for acting on their sense of outrage.

How corruption can be differentiated from immorality is an open question. If a lie is immoral, then scientific fraud—whether by plagiarizing texts or falsifying data—is immoral as well. But whether it is corruption is more a question of philosophy than practicality. Often-times, examples of fudging laboratory work for neater results might well be seen as advancing the cause of a research project. If the loss of research support for a worthy program, for example, is threatened by a bit of discrepant data, then the researcher might consider "tidying up" the results for the sake of saving the grant.

Where corruption in science and engineering perhaps bears most watching is in the relatively recent marriage between corporations and universities in conducting genetic engineering research. The field itself has long presented ethical and moral dilemmas, but the risk of corruption increases in the high intellectual property stakes involved in genetic discoveries. The fear is that academic and intellectual freedom has been "corrupted" when scientists working under the support of the corporation deliberately withhold data from colleagues at competing institutions. These practices have taken place to a disturbing extent with no final consensus in view.

Corruption will always be present within the human realm. The war on it in the developing world has become vigorous and is showing success. Evidence shows that as those countries democratize and generate more internal wealth, corruption will decrease. At the same time, however, the growth of new scientific and technological tools will render corruption increasingly creative and sophisticated. The incursion into personal privacy through sensor technology applied to "protect democracy" can be seen as chilling enough. The challenge, then, is to anticipate what new forms of infectious malfeasance loom as the science behind biotechnology and nanotechnology, and the digital instruments of technology generate new ways of doing harm.

Development Ethics;; Engineering Ethics;; Ethics: Overview;; Office of Research Integrity;; Tuskegee Experiment;; Whistleblowing.

Caiden, Gerald E. (1988). "Toward a General Theory of Official Corruption." Asian Journal of Public Administration 10(1): 3–26.

Krimsky, Sheldon. (2003). Science in the Private Interest: Has the Lure of Profits Corrupted Biomedical Research? Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Rose-Ackerman, Susan. (1999). Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences, and Reform. New York: Cambridge University Press.

INTERNET RESOURCE

Transparency International. Available from http://www.transparency.org.

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