Bioengineered crops: a windfall for agricultural faculties?
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Suppose that humans want to be free from the meddling of technocrats and commissars,
bankers and tycoons...or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of
existence.
Noam
Chomsky,
American linguist
(1928-)
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Paradoxically, the deal gave the faculty
leeway to pursue imaginative projects in basic science. |
A
landmark “strategic alliance” clinched by the University of California caused an
uproar in the academic world, but for a rising generation of scientists, the deal
probably contains what the future will be made of
In 1998, the University
of California at Berkeley concluded a $25 million, five-year agreement with the Swiss
company Novartis that has come to be regarded as a watershed in the relationship
of industry with higher education.
For the first time, the work of an entire university department, not just that of
its individual members contracting independently, was to be underwritten by a multinational
company, with interests in health care, agribusiness and nutrition.
The corporation, through the Novartis Agricultural Discovery Institute, newly set
up in La Jolla, California, was to provide roughly one-third of the budget of the
university’s Department of Plant and Microbial Biology for five years. In return,
the Swiss company won an unprecedented privilege: the first right to negotiate a
license to one-third of the patentable discoveries made in any of the department’s
laboratories.
Was this a sellout or an inspired coup? Industrial sponsorship of academic research
was nothing new; by 1998, nine percent of all research at American universities was
sponsored by corporations, a total of $2 billion as compared with the $13 billion
spent by the federal government that year. But where faculty members or research
teams had made grant proposals individually for funding to underwrite their work,
this agreement appeared to constitute the plundering of public resources by a private
corporation.
Shopping
around for optimal conditions
The
university’s need to reassess its sources of revenue was recognized in 1993, when
Chancellor Chang-Ling Tien set up a Biotechnology Planning Board to look into long-term
relationships with industry. The idea was to tap into the universities’ right to
license their inventions, first granted by the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980.
According to Gordon Rausser, an agricultural economist who was dean of the College
of Natural Resources during the negotiations, the panel, which brought members of
the university together with more than a dozen representatives from private industry,
spun its wheels for a few years, failing to attract sponsors. Since the 1960s, federal
funding for the agricultural sciences remained essentially flat, while medical and
engineering schools have taken an increasing proportion of the spoils nationally.
“The question we faced was: How do you go about positioning yourself to advance your
interests?” Rausser says. Rather than go out begging, the university set out what
it considered its optimal conditions for a partnership. Several companies expressed
interest, some of which wanted to be able to cherry-pick scientists whose work might
be ripe for commercial application. Only Novartis was willing to allow the faculty
the degree of intellectual freedom it was looking for, or as the agreement puts it,
“unrestricted funds to support general, non-targeted research.”
In return, the Agricultural Discovery Institute was granted a 30-day review period
to take a first look at research coming out of the department before it was published,
and a further 90 days to decide whether to request that the university pursue a patent
protection on it. Brian Wright, a Berkeley agricultural economist who has worked
on intellectual property, points out that the rights to first negotiation under the
agreement does not give the company the right to buy, “only the right to pay enough
so that the university’s willing not to offer it to anybody else.” This was hardly
giving up the store.
Such distinctions were lost in the furor following the announcement of the agreement,
given the climate of public resistance to bioengineered crops. Advocates of ecologically
sustainable agriculture in particular were outraged by what they felt to be an institutional
endorsement of biotechnology.
Pies were thrown at two of the principals and the Students for Responsible Research
coalition denounced the agreement’s “narrow focus on profit-oriented and controversial
biotechnological research.” Berkeley’s Academic Senate fiercely debated whether the
agreement had been too hurriedly pushed through and how it might compromise academic
integrity.
One of the agreement’s features that most rankled in Berkeley was that two Novartis
representatives would sit on a five-person committee that would decide how to allocate
the funds for research every year. But Steven Briggs, who heads the La Jolla Institute,
since renamed the Torrey Mesa Research Institute, notes that this provision was included
at the request of the faculty, not the company. Rausser argues that it was conceived
as a way to gain industry intelligence into whether comparable research might already
be under way in the private sector.
Funding
the unexpected
According
to department chair Andrew Jackson, the two Novartis representatives essentially
concurred in the first years of the agreement with decisions reached by the faculty.
“I don’t feel there’s any problem with academic freedom at all,” he says. Paradoxically,
the Novartis deal gave the faculty leeway to pursue imaginative projects in basic
science for which they might not otherwise have been able to secure financing. Little
room now remains in the allocation of federal revenue for “funding the unexpected,”
as one emeritus professor put it. Given the intense competition for funds, a conservatism
prevails on the national review boards that favours experiments that are not likely
to fail.
The members of the department were at liberty not to take part in the agreement:
of 30, one opted out and two abstained on principle. Many faculty members are grateful
for the chance to pursue work that federal agencies might not have funded. “This
is a godsend,” says Loy Volkman, an insect virologist. “We have poor funding from
the state, and have to find up to 70 percent elsewhere. And usually, the payer gets
to call the tune.”
The agreement allows the university unusual freedom in negotiating the patents it
would retain. The University of Washington’s arrangement with Monsanto, by comparison,
allows the company both to file the patent and to see it through to publication,
an abdication of control that Berkeley would never assent to, according to Carol
Mimura, of its Office of Technology Licensing.
A
mousetrap or sign of the times?
Since
the agreement was reached, Syngenta (as this branch of Novartis was renamed) has
optioned the rights to seven patent applications, of which four arose from projects
funded in part by the La Jolla Institute, and three were solely funded by it.
A younger generation of scientists, aware that their working lives will call upon
them to operate both in and out of the ivory tower, appears to have made peace with
the deal. “It’s a sign of the times,” says Michael Goodin, a post-doctoral student.
“This is the environment we will be operating in. The only other resource is public
funding, and it’s not there.”
At the annual retreats held by the institute, both faculty and graduate students
report that they have been surprised by how freely ideas can be exchanged with outside
scientists. Nevertheless, at hearings in California’s state capitol last year, Democratic
Senator Tom Hayden characterized the agreement as “usurpation of democracy by the
biotech industry,” and Senator Steven Peace, chairman of the budget committee, raised
the issue of accountability, denouncing the reporting requirements built into the
agreement as “a mousetrap that nobody from a distance can ever audit.”
An internal university committee was to have filed a report on the agreement halfway
through its course; it is unlikely to be completed before the fourth year.
Meanwhile, because Syngenta is in theory free to revoke its funding at a year’s notice,
the faculty have continued to apply for other funding. The jury is still out on whether
Syngenta is likely to have gained much more from the agreement than an observation
post from which to keep abreast of the latest developments in a world-class university.
With the shrinking of the economy and the company’s investment in transgenic crops
now in question, it seems unlikely that the agreement will be renewed.
The hopes of generous financing for universities from biotech companies that seemed
likely a few years ago now appear misplaced. The Novartis agreement may itself go
down as yet another inconclusive “experiment” in the university’s history. |
