The design of cigarette packets is heavily regulated in many countries in order to serve the purpose of prevention. But research into whether plain packaging actually reduces the amount people smoke is itself supported by Philip Morris International. | Photo: Radharc Images / Alamy Stock Photo

In 2024, two days before Christmas, Francesco Pepe, the astrophysicist and then Director of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Geneva, bravely sent an email to Nick Hayek, the CEO of Swatch Group. He asked if there was any interest in funding a new instrument to study the atmosphere of exoplanets. The team had already received CHF 1.5 million in public money, but “we had a very hard time getting the most innovative part of the instrument funded, so we were stuck”, says Pepe. A couple of months later, Swatch endowed the project, called Ristretto, with CHF 3.5 million. “This was the first time in 30 years that we received private funding,” says Pepe, smiling radiantly.

Private funding is not new, but the scope of its presence in science is. A 2024 survey by the company CH Media found that the ten Swiss universities and the two Federal Institutes of Technology have 162 privately funded chairs out of a total of over 4,500, an increase of more than 20 since 2019. And, according to the Federal Statistical Office, private funding for higher education institutions rose from CHF 125 million in 2000 to almost CHF 900 million in 2023. And these amounts are set to increase, as the federal government wants to cut the budgets for education, research and innovation by hundreds of millions per year.

A lot of private financing currently has philanthropic aims, as seems to be the case with Swatch. The firm and the Ristretto team agreed to acknowledge Swatch in any publications. “There was no interference with the nature of the project”, says Pepe. But some players may exploit academia for their own interests, challenging the fundamental values of research: integrity, freedom and credibility. “It’s OK to have a handful of chairs out of 300 privately financed, but relying massively on private funding really means the loss of independence”, says Luciana Vaccaro with conviction. Vaccaro is the Rector of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (HES-SO) and the President of Swissuniversities, the association of Swiss higher education institutions.

Philanthropy, with a catch

In 2012, controversy arose in the media when UBS allocated CHF 100 million for the University of Zurich. The money enabled the creation of the UBS International Center of Economics in Society. The first contract was not disclosed. “I was shocked that this was reported in the media with little comment”, says Markus Müller, a professor in public law at the University of Bern. He then launched an appeal for the protection of academic independence, which collected more than 1,600 signatures worldwide. The contracts were later disclosed.

Switzerland is home to more than 13,000 charitable foundations and about 230 corporate foundations. “We are lucky to have such a large number”, says Olaf Blanke, a neurologist at EPFL. The Bertarelli Foundation supported the launch of the Center for Neuroprosthetics in 2012, including Blanke’s chair. He stresses that the support came with no strings attached and that “the Center wouldn’t have been possible without it”. Like Blanke, many scientists and institutions see private support as a means to achieve a high scientific level and perform translational research where public money is not sufficient.

Müller sees no general wrong in charitable financing, as long as it is not linked with direct economic interests or strong ideology, and warns that here the devil is in the detail. He recalls the 2015 case of the Family Larsson-Rosenquist Foundation endowing a chair for research into breastfeeding with CHF 20 million at the University of Zurich. The foundation’s goal of increasing the global rate of breastfeeding aligns well with the aims of a company making breastfeeding products that was set up by the same family.

Transparency as a goal

Corporate funding has greater economic interests and often involves secret agreements that can hide influence. From 2013, Philip Morris International (PMI) started sponsoring research at the University of Zurich (UZH) on the influence of plain packaging on the smoking behaviours of youngsters. The researchers found no evidence that packaging changes purchasing habits, and the lead author asserted his independence in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. In 2023, an annex of the agreement between UZH and PMI became known to the anti-smoking association Oxysuisse, which summarised it in a briefing paper. The annex, they wrote, clearly shows that PMI decided, for example, if and in which form the results of the study should be published.

Vaccaro has her own experience with funding from PMI. Her institution, HES-SO, has contracts with the company. She points to a dilemma: “On the one hand, there are the laws on transparency, but on the other hand, we are subject to non-disclosure agreements”. Non-disclosure agreements are legal documents between two or more parties to protect confidential information and intellectual property. They oblige the parties to keep disclosed secrets confidential and to treat sensitive information with diligence. They are quite common when private parties fund research.

Oxysuisse therefore launched a survey in 2024. Leveraging federal and cantonal transparency laws, they asked 31 higher education institutions to disclose whether they had been bound by any contracts with the tobacco industry over the last five years. The research will be published soon and has uncovered dozens of ongoing collaborations involving 10 institutions. A few entities were not fully transparent about their contracts, while some refused to share them. “The big problem here is transparency, and we are ready to go to the federal courts to enforce it,” says Michela Canevascini, the Director of Oxysuisse.

Research integrity first

It becomes even more intricate when massive funding is involved. The Swiss Finance Institute (SFI) is a private foundation financed mainly by Swiss banks, including UBS. It pays salaries of CHF 50,000 per year to at least 25 professors, as the online magazine Republik reports. They all have a chair at the institute, but come from almost all Swiss universities, where they are primarily employed. Sponsorship of financial expertise in Switzerland is so widespread that it is now difficult to find independent voices in the field, as Müller warns.

Müller also notes that “it is not enough to state that freedom of research is guaranteed. We must look at the actual conditions, and remember that cognitive biases always play a role”. He thinks that the issue of freedom becomes inescapable when a professor’s salary depends in part or totally on a private source with high stakes involved.

The freedom of academic research is enshrined in Article 20 of the Swiss Federal Constitution, but each university determines whether and how to establish private collaborations. Müller calls for more uniform, clearer regulations and for a ban on companies sponsoring research institutions where they have direct economic interests. Canevascini also questions the ethics of collaborating with an “industry that kills one in two smokers and creates strong dependencies”. For Vaccaro, the issue is more complex: “Can we ban funding from some companies? Tobacco is not forbidden in Switzerland, yet society expects us not to work with these companies. These ethical questions deserve a debate within society”.

Such a debate has yet to start in Switzerland. ALLEA, the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities, has recently released a statement to address the ethical concerns. It proposes that research institutions evaluate the alignment between their values and those of their commercial partners, adopt transparent contracts, and prioritise the protection of research integrity over short-term financial gains.

Meanwhile, scientists will have to make do with even less public funding, given the looming federal cuts. Such conditions may further push scientists into private arms. As for Pepe, he is already looking for new sponsors. And Vaccaro? She says, “we need a long-term vision. Research and innovation are the responsibility of the State, and relying on private funding can result in a highly fragile system. It cannot be the solution for all problems”.