For those of you that don't keep up on frivolous news sites or Mars Candy's press releases, you may not have yet heard that Portland was ranked last in terms of America's most manly cities. Of course, their metrics are arbitrary and culturally biased, and the study is downright sexist. But whether you love the study or loathe it, it is successful: it gives Mars and their candy publicity.
Despite that, the ethics of the study are not the issues at hand here. The real issue is corporate sponsorship of science. Although it is common for corporations to sponsor studies that directly relate to their products or services, sponsorship strictly for publicity is generally reserved for sports. We are breaking new ground here and the imagination is the limit. Not only could there be endless new sources of funding, but also endless new opportunities for managing a public image. Soon commercials may end in "Skittles. Official Sponsor of the 2015 Large Hadron Collider experiments." The NSF's McMurdo Antarctic base may be renamed to the "Hagen Daz Station." Even newly discovered particle pairs could be named "Kit" and "Kat." We are truly at an amazing time right now, and it is progressing fast. Corporations are already gaining the same legal rights and treatments as individual citizens--if not preferential treatment--so why not name something after a corporation you would otherwise name after a person? (Well, for one, legality has limited bearing on what is a good or bad idea. For two, Americans have been duped by corporations and their fronts with dubious economic, ethical and religious arguments into giving money from the poor to the rich; this may continue that shift. And so much more...) What could be after science? Maybe art? Maybe literature? Who knows.
P.S. If there are any candy companies that want to sponsor very public research on the corporate sponsorship of science as a means of generating publicity, please contact me ASAP.
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