Doni Bloomfield (Fordham University School of Law) has posted How Science Grantmakers Govern on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Science grantmakers regulate risk. This reality is obscured in innovation law scholarship, which treats science grants as influencing only the rate and direction of invention. But seeing grants solely as innovation tools misses their role in governing the many risks posed by research—from the privacy risks of sharing health data to the pandemic risks of modifying viruses. Through a close examination of the National Institutes of Health, the world’s premier science funder, this Article shows how science grantmakers regulate risk by shaping a broad array of outcomes beyond invention: research ethics, lab safety, data sharing, workplace relations, and much else. Lacking the traditional administrative tools of rulemaking, adjudication, and litigation, the NIH has crafted a distinctive form of embedded governance that leaves research oversight largely in the hands of researchers. Analyzing science grantmaker governance has conceptual and normative payoffs for both innovation law and administrative law. First, the analysis uncovers legal scholarship’s blind spot in understanding how innovation policies regulate research risks. Recognizing science grantmaker governance opens the door to assessing how other innovation policies govern risk. Second, my analysis reveals the NIH’s distinctive approach to risk regulation, allowing us to compare its strengths and weaknesses to alternative legal interventions in private and public law. Grantmakers’ expertise and enmeshment in science allow them to respond quickly to emerging risks, but their deference to research institutions leaves them poorly equipped to regulate substantial dangers in the long run. Finally, these insights offer guidance for rebuilding and reforming grantmaker governance in the wake of the second Trump Administration’s assault on science.
Recommended.
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