Well, can peer review, which plainly has benefit in mind, can it be used to stultify or retard scientific progress?
A. Well, here’s the problem. As scientific research has become more and more specialized, the number of peers for any given piece of research that gets peer reviewed gets smaller and smaller, which means, there’s a greater and greater likelihood that you know who you’re reviewing, even though it’s supposed to be blind peer review. So there is this issue of the potential for a conflict of interest to arise in peer review increasingly as time goes on. This is one of the reasons why there’s been this great concern about intellectual property law and research ethics boards and all this kind of stuff. It’s a kind of a biproduct of peer review becoming very specialized and the ability of people to be able to sort of, kind of, yes, I know his work so well, you know, I might benefit from it more than he would, you know.
