IELTS Essay # 91 - Nowadays more and more researches are being carried out and sponsored by private organizations. Do advantages outweigh the disadvantages in such cases?

Essay # 91

Nowadays more and more researches are being carried out and sponsored by private organizations. Do advantages outweigh the disadvantages in such cases?

Research and development is necessary for any field to grow and contribute more to the society. Subject to this, there have been many private institutions funding research projects, where the government cannot lend a hand. This essay shall discuss whether private funding helps the primary purpose of research or not.

Researches help us gain comprehension and erudition on various aspects of a given project, and successful researches require a lot of time and money. It is true that the government has a lot of issues on their hand and it may be possible for them to overlook the potential of a research project and not fund in due to financial deficit. Here’s where the private institutions can be of help. Private firms can provide the much necessary financial backing to researchers to carry on with their findings. Because the private firms have a lot of hold in the market, their contacts can help market the research analysis too.

In contrast, private funding does have some serious drawbacks. As private organizations are driven by profit, they may not favour those researches that could be valuable to society only because there is less monetary gain in that. This need for profit can turn into greed which can produce biased research outcomes that are in that company’s interests. There have been many cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies in the news for making false claims about their research for their product; this just goes to show the extents to which private companies can go to earn money.

To sum up, I think the drawbacks of private funding are quite wrong at a moral level, and are not in the interests of the society in general. If there is some government intervention, I think these researches can be conducted more ethically. 

(295 words)