Biotechnology: Big Money Comes to the University
Rule, James B.
American universities in the 1980s have witnessed some striking developments at that tender point where academic research meets big business and big government. Some of the most dramatic of...
...Intellectual Agenda...
...Faculty ought not to teach in areas where their commercial interests are direct and proprietary...
...There can be no doubt that biotechnology promises both first-class science and lifeenhancing practical benefits...
...Universities do provide a kind of "infrastructure" for economic activity, whether they intend to or not...
...the idea of making university functions selffinancing has taken on a special appeal...
...At the University of Maryland: In an effort to transform itself into a center for biotechnology and other high-tech industry, Baltimore County is devoting itself to creating what the County Executive terms "the needed infrastructure of roads, mass transit and schools and the establishment of a first rate research university system...
...the rub comes in the specific terms and arrangements...
...Monsanto and the university shared patent rights over all innovations resulting from the funding...
...Note that the capital required to found firms capable of pursuing such developments is relatively modest by the standards of the past...
...It is striking how important these qualities are to many people...
...Monsanto retained, for commercial reasons, the option of delaying disclosure of research results for up to four years...
...The ultimate aim is to be able to create life-forms "to order" —to suppress or emphasize (if not actually create) characteristics of living things that would never occur in the normal course of species reproduction...
...An unsettling theme runs through these accounts...
...All three of these issues point to a single question: Who will profit from university activities associated with biotechnology, and how will such profit-making impinge on university life...
...Yet the differences are fundamental...
...These special qualities of university life need defending...
...University collaboration with outside agencies may lead to distortion of such possibilities...
...Genetic engineering is heavily underwritten by federal research funding...
...The plan was to offer funds to individual researchers in exchange for sweeping rights over the commercial fruits of their activities...
...The situation would be different, they argue, if biotechnology were somehow a corrupting activity—second-rate in its scientific inspiration or destructive in its social effects...
...As many have noted, free flow of ideas and findings is, or ought to be, a basic element of science...
...American universities have always had to make their way among organizations of vastly greater economic and political power...
...q 436 • DISSENT...
...Other specially designed micro-organisms may provide crucial ingredients for high-tech manufacturing...
...Our students may leave us determined to make their personal fortunes by age thirty-five or to spend the rest of their lives cultivating their karma in a commune...
...These suggestions obviously touch on only a few of the policy issues raised by biotechnology and its kindred activities...
...To work in a setting where one does not have to sell people something they do not need, nor produce a result the wisdom of which one may fundamentally doubt, is a privilege...
...Those who work in universities take it for granted that ideas should be assessed in terms of their truth-value, rather than in terms of who concocted them, who has access to them, or what profits they can produce...
...Such a step would require participation both from universities and government sponsors of science...
...The Promise of Biotechnology Everyone can recite practical benefits that have stemmed from "pure research" in the life sciences—ranging from control of disease to breeding techniques in agriculture...
...Elsewhere the new technologies work by making once-expensive and scarce substances relatively plentiful...
...Martin Kenney, in his Biotechnology, estimates minimum costs of setting up a biotechnology firm as six to seven million dollars over a two- to three-year period—an amount by no means beyond the reach of an ambitious professor backed by a handful of venture capitalists...
...Any life-enhancing technology, it seems, can be turned to destructive uses, and the role of biotechnology in warfare would be diabolically destructive...
...Create special incentives for scientists to remain free of commercial ties...
...it always costs more to administer a comprehensive arts-and-sciences curriculum than the institution can realize from fees for doing so...
...The often indiscriminate expansion of the 1960s quickly gave way to a period where student populations were falling and where government support for research was cut, but where operating expenses rose sharply...
...Often the connection between original discoveries and their repercussions in practical innovation has been long indeed...
...Yet the fact that research and teaching in the university should attract such talented folk, who could be certain of more lucrative careers elsewhere, should hardly surprise us...
...And all this may be true without conscious intent on the part of faculty...
...It makes it less likely that anyone will get the idea that, by changing the content of this program of instruction or that line of research, the university will finally start showing a decent return on investment...
...True, we who work in universities are supposed to produce learning in our own right, and students who are more learned at exit than at entry...
...From this fact, many have drawn the conclusion that universities are properly no more than the sum of the services they offer—with little to distinguish their inner workings from those of profitmaking think-tanks or consulting services...
...The products of genetic engineering would be the ultimate chemical and bacteriological weapons—agents against which the human body could have no natural powers of resistance...
...Military applications aside, the commercial significance of these possibilities has never been lost on investors...
...But how does one create a role for such potentially lucrative research that does not tend to make the university simply another profit-making institution...
...Shortly after this agreement was signed, Allied purchased two million dollars worth of stock in Calgene, a biotechnology firm founded by Valentine...
...Obviously students approach universities with all sorts of intellectual and career goals in mind...
...In the case of biotechnology, at least three of these essential qualities are vulnerable...
...Though these potentials have understandably received little public discussion from biotechnology enthusiasts, military scientists appear to be following them with great interest...
...They ought not to have to weigh the value of students as present or prospective personnel against their value as contributors to the intellectual discipline...
...Environmental and industrial applications are the least explored thus far, but they are no less intriguing...
...Biotechnology is only one of many triggers for the arrangements that stir such concerns...
...It would be disastrous to slight them...
...Success in even a small portion of the agricultural ventures now being attempted could have sweeping effects on food production— including significant benefits for farmers and consumers in the world's poorest countries...
...Yet the informal, collegial, slightly haphazard qualities of university life also reflect values that are in short supply elsewhere...
...Under these circumstances...
...A university as a whole can virtually never run at a profit...
...But these new technologies of life dramatize widespread tensions between university values and the rewards of non-university activities in technology and industry...
...The most vulnerable members of any university community are students...
...But such a response, at least in the case of biotechnology, would raise problems of its own...
...Biotechnology as Political Economy It is stunning how, in recent decades, political debate has narrowed to almost obsessive concern with economic growth...
...Louis: The Monsanto Company, in an agreement signed in 1982, channelled 23.5 million dollars to the university's medical school to fund research leading to marketable biomedical discoveries...
...Many people are permanently disenchanted by the prospect of spending their lives in hierarchical organizations geared to producing one sort of instrumental result or another...
...Much the same ethic holds for all elements of university life...
...But such objections seem unlikely to block the development of these alluring technologies indefinitely...
...Today, both public and private universities would be making all sorts of accommodations with outside organizations even if genetic engineering had never come along...
...these firms, often founded by university faculty, may aim at developing just one or a few applications that could bring fabulous success—and perhaps eventual acquisition by an Allied or Monsanto...
...The impact of biotechnology on university life is a microcosm of what can happen when lucrative non-university activities are situated in institutions that must always struggle uneasily for independence...
...The following year, the initial offering by Cetus, another biotechnology firm, set another Wall Street record for the largest amount of money raised in an initial public offering: 115 million dollars...
...Agricultural applications could well rival the medical in long-term economic and social impact...
...I have always felt that this is a lucky thing...
...Then there is the special attraction to universities of claiming for themselves a piece of the biotechnology action—in the form of ownership of firms making the big profits expected to grow out of university labs...
...The only way that scientific work can properly be acclaimed is by the consensus of those in a position to judge for themselves...
...American university life has recently produced a bumper crop of stories like these, stories of diverse relationships between educational institutions and heavily bankrolled organizations...
...One can exaggerate the novelty of biotechnology in these respects...
...For many universities, current conditions make such questions all the more acute...
...How does the role of researchers as teachers, colleagues and members of the university community withstand a situation where university-based research may lead directly to a private fortune...
...Our research may lead to a better mousetrap or to the perfection of arguments for total solipsism...
...Under the agreement, members of the firm received virtually unrestricted consulting opportunities with medical school researchers and access to its facilities...
...Many observers believe that biotechnology will eventually alter the diagnosis and treatment of a wide variety of major illnesses...
...Enthusiasts of these university–corporate symbioses find little to worry about in these developments...
...Nor should there be any danger that generations of students emerge from the academy whose intellectual capital is programmed to the needs of a particular firm...
...One result is that firms are seeking to get as close as possible to university laboratories—as in the relationships described above between Monsanto and Washington University and Allied and the University of California at Davis...
...But to the contrary, proponents insist, these developments are state-of-the-art within their academic disciplines...
...Unable to answer in the affirmative, President Bok of Harvard, at the urging of his faculty, declined in 1980 to institute such a corporate experiment there...
...There is the danger that curricula may be skewed toward the profitable, rather than the profound...
...This concentration may not outlast the next few years...
...If preference in such things as participation in science policy panels and access to grants were allocated to those who chose to remain independent, Krimsky argues, the whole system would benefit...
...In 1980, the initial public stock offering by Genentech, one of the most famous and successful biotechnology firms, set a record for the fastest price per share increase ever recorded on Wall Street: from $35 at its initial offering to $89 in twenty minutes...
...Finally, tiny start-up firms with ambitions to grow like Genentech and Cetus...
...It reminds us that bottom-line accounting has severe limits for institutions geared to pursuit of good thinking and liberal learning as ends in themselves...
...Yet another special twist to biotechnology is the rise it has fostered in entrepreneurship by individual faculty members...
...Genetic engineering offers the prospect of altering crops and livestock to fit human needs and environmental constraints...
...What all these companies share, besides the obvious hankering for commercial success, is dependence on some highly rarefied ideas and skills—intellectual capital thus far available mainly from universities...
...But the problems of university involvement in biotechnology have to do not with the notion of participation in principle...
...But success or failure in these efforts is not to be judged on whether any outside institution works more profitably as a result...
...To this end, Maryland's Governor William Schaefer has committed the state to major new investments to expand the University of Maryland, as part of his effort to "attract firms . . . and keep firms here...
...Will university administrators be able to weigh the opportunity cost of encouraging research in applied directions, against the more abstract alternatives...
...Valentine was accused of favoring projects in which he had a commercial interest over other topics for doctoral students' research...
...The conclusion one must finally accept regarding biotechnology is scarcely that it should not be pursued, nor indeed that it should never be pursued within university settings...
...These are, to put it mildly, rare qualities in a highly bottom-line-oriented world...
...Other institutions have tried to create such boundary-maintaining principles and failed, while some have hardly tried...
...Large firms apparently find it less satisfactory in the case of biotechnology than elsewhere to wait for critical results to appear in normal scholarly communications and then put in-house researchers to work on them...
...Faculty absorbed in lucrative research ventures may be unwilling or unable to help students consider research problems whose merits are strictly intellectual...
...One would hate to see these possibilities banished from the university, just as one would hate to see biotechnology researchers deprived of university influence...
...In one of the most noted and successful biotechnology applications to date, genetically altered bacteria produce insulin in quantity, relieving drug companies from reliance on slaughterhouses as sources of the naturally produced substance...
...The once-scorned doctrines of Kondratieff are now treated a bit more respectfully by economic historians...
...Since the 1970s, American higher education as a whole has been experiencing a recession, if not a depression...
...Second, large, diverse firms like Monsanto and Allied, for whom biotechnology is simply one of many means of developing new products...
...One cannot fail to be impressed, for example, by the financial and other sacrifices that young scholars are willing to endure, in hopes of making a university career...
...One form of responsibility incumbent on universities is to make available to students a wide array of intellectual possibilities...
...Will history regard the 1980s as the period in which an array of promising intellectual openings were missed, because too many resources and too many highly talented figures were absorbed in applied pursuits...
...The modeling of coils of genetic material—bearing thousands of bits of information in precise relationship to one another and reproducing themselves at the moment when new cells are generated—sparked an impulse like that triggered by countless other discoveries in "pure" science: To bring what was now understood under conscious human control...
...In short, universities are not charged to ensure the worldly success of outside institutions, nor to uphold any values other than the sharing and improvement of ideas...
...At the root of these changes are the discoveries in the 1950s of the mechanisms by which characteristics of living things are transmitted from generation to generation...
...If biotechnology firms want graduates who will serve as lab technicians and researchers, that possibility should hardly be denied to students planning careers...
...None of the firms active in the field today, large or small, would have an agenda without the vast investments in basic research made by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and other funding agencies...
...These commercial affiliations led to friction with students and colleagues...
...When universities accommodate themselves too thoroughly to the agenda of non-university institutions, they begin to lose the qualities that make universities worth having in the first place...
...As the case of biotechnology shows, university values do not maintain themselves automatically— especially in the face of situations in which some element of university life suddenly takes on great instrumental value to outside interests...
...This can mean animals that grow faster or remain invulnerable to normally endemic diseases, or plants that thrive under normally inhospitable conditions...
...And clearly ideas like these are much easier to envisage in principle than to put into effect...
...Hence the requirement imposed by Monsanto on researchers funded by the firm at Washington University that dissemination of results be restricted where this was deemed commercially necessary...
...Will students be willing and able to consider intellectually compelling but noncommercial subjects for their research...
...At Washington University in St...
...They stand out because the nature of their "productivity" is inherently diffuse, and the results they are intended to produce are extremely hard to define in instrumental terms...
...The original land-grant universities have always been expected to make themselves useful to "society" —something that has in practice often meant the interests ascendant within state politics at any particular moment...
...Moreover—perhaps with the ugly exception of military applications— genetic engineering has every prospect of yielding a generous outpouring of life-giving innovations...
...For skeptics, such drastic intervention has brought great foreboding—as in the fear that some ultra-potent bacteria or other living thing will be released from genetic engineering laboratories...
...and certainly we have no reason to think about any discipline that what is most lucrative 434 • DISSENT Blotec'otology will always be worthy of attention in strictly intellectual terms...
...Thus ideas developed at public expense and on behalf of public goals are being converted as rapidly as possible to private profit-making...
...For this allure is virtually endless, in terms of both potential profit and alleviation of compelling human needs...
...But if the only curriculum available is one tailored to the needs of industrial clients—or any other outside interest— then students lose access to what all universities ought to provide...
...Just as it would be disastrous for any of these institutions to emulate universities in pursuit of the results they seek, so is it for universities when they depart from their characteristic virtues to accommodate to outside institutions...
...They, presumably, start by lacking the intellectual antibodies against poor ideas and irresponsible teaching that learning will eventually provide...
...Some observers believe that biotechnology, along with computing, could foster another historical wave of economic growth lasting well into the next century...
...Another form of skewed opportunities can arise when higher education is treated as "infrastructure" for industrial development—as in the planning for the University of Maryland noted above...
...but while it remains, pressures to purchase or otherwise profit from university expertise will be intense...
...But for the new technologies of genetics, the road from scientific inspiration to marketable results is much shorter...
...One does wonder about microbiology, biochemistry, and other fields where biotechnology has taken on such special import...
...It is that its pursuit must not be allowed to erode those special qualities of openness to new ideas and primacy of intellectual values that make universities distinct...
...Each research effort undertaken with these funds required approval by a board half of whose members were from Monsanto...
...Some of the most dramatic of these have involved technologies of genetic engineering—biotechnology, for short—with their much-contested promise to combine extraordinary social benefits with fabulous profits...
...But what will exploitation of such profitable technologies do for—and to—the universities...
...In a world where more and more organizations, public and private, have strictly defined "missions" to accomplish, and where the bottom line in these missions is profit, productivity or narrowly defined efficiency, universities stand out...
...These special twists have to do with some unique qualities of biotechnology itself— or to be more exact, the relations of the technology to the underlying science...
...One need not be anticlerical, antimilitarist or even antibusiness to insist that universities must not be expected to work like churches, armies or firms...
...Other critics have simply opposed the principle of tampering with what they see as the natural order of species...
...For some, the answer would be to forswear all university involvement with biotechnology and any other activity likely to generate private profits...
...As ordinary university citizens, subject to the same rules as others in terms of promotion, tenure, teaching and academic freedom (for faculty) and grading, distribution requirements, fellowships and progress toward degrees (for students...
...Hence classic issues of political philosophy take a back seat to a single question: Which political forces and personalities are most likely to coax magic from the economic growth machine...
...in the humanities as much as the sciences, a free market of ideas is the precondition for both teaching and scholarship...
...Ensure that new teaching ventures funded by, or in response to, lucrative forms of cooperation with outside agencies do not slight the less commercial elements of the liberal arts curriculum...
...The disturbing thing about such arrangements is not that they necessarily lead to poor research, or private profit at public expense, or distortions in the intellectual agenda of students or faculty—though all these evils may well arise in particular cases...
...At what point do the activities carried out in quest of profit on equity—as distinct, say, from paid consultantship for outside interests—become incompatible with university status...
...FALL • 1988 • 433 Biotechnology In a way, this is ironic...
...Why shouldn't universities welcome the collaboration necessary to foster the new technologies...
...Private firms are expected to match these funds at later steps in creation of the university "infrastructure...
...the contract accorded the firm patent rights over research conducted by Valentine and others...
...Then there is the strikingly short sequence between scientific discovery and the development of patents, trade secrets, production processes and other sources of profit...
...The intellectual puzzles of biotechnology are as compelling as any on the agenda of the life sciences...
...Many consider this the most distinctive policy issue posed for universities by these technologies...
...These ties involve universities with agencies ranging from the military and the intelligence establishment to private foundations, foreign governments, contract research organizations, and a wide variety of other 432 • DISSENT Biotechnology profit-making enterprises...
...What response, even in principle, would suffice to preserve the special virtues of university life against such pressures...
...The most compelling need is to get such ideas considered...
...As a result of activism stemming from such concerns, genetic engineering has been subjected to close government monitoring...
...For one thing, the critical expertise in biotechnology is extremely concentrated in university research laboratories...
...What's at Stake Since Clark Kerr's fulsome Uses of the University a generation ago, the notion has become commonplace that modern universities are "into" everything...
...Even if the more extravagant projections for biotechnology prove overblown, genetic engineering is bound to be among the biggest money-making activities associated with American universities in the 1990s...
...University researchers participating in funded activities were required to declare any potentially conflicting relationships with other firms and to promise Monsanto that they would not divulge commercially relevant information from the Monsanto-sponsored studies...
...Teaching and Curriculum...
...Sheldon Krimsky, the Tufts University expert in biotechnology policy, points out that many science policy issues are decided by scientists who are themselves commercially involved in the activities they are supposed to decide about...
...How will pursuit of such profits shape institutions supposedly predicated on values quite different from profitability...
...Communications...
...For example, they have declined contracts where the work being performed cannot be readily disclosed, or they have sought to limit the time devoted by regular faculty in consulting and other non-academic activity...
...Genetic engineers, for example, FALL • 1988 • 431 Biotechnology are seeking to develop bacteria that would devour oil spills and combat other environmentally noxious conditions...
...More 430 • DISSENT Biotechnology disquieting is the blurring of essential boundaries between principles prized in universities and those of other organizations and interests...
...But no one has suggested that no others are equally compelling...
...Indeed, much of the pressure on universities in these connections is pressure from entrepreneurs to situate commercial research as close as possible to federally funded laboratories, so as to be first in line for patents and other profitable spinoffs...
...Finally, lurking in the background, are military applications...
...Evolution from scientific discovery to marketable properties that used to take decades or generations may now unfold in a few years...
...The same strictures should hold, mutatis mutandis, for graduate students...
...To many, his "long waves" of economic growth now seem real enough—and these waves appear incited by technological innovations that ramify throughout economic life...
...At the University of California, Davis: In 1981, the Allied Corporation signed a contract worth $2.5 million with Professor Ray Valentine...
...Development of scientific applications for profit has to run counter to this ethic at some stage...
...But biotechnology does add new levels of complexity to long-standing tensions in university life...
...We may take satisfaction in all such outcomes, provided that the thinking involved was as acute and broadly informed as could be...
...I can hardly offer a comprehensive answer to such a difficult question...
...Since the 1950s, in a celebrated series of experiments, molecular biologists and other researchers have succeeded in altering genes, transferring genes from one creature to another, and "turning" individual genes "on" and "off...
...In the case of biotechnology, one can hardly expect researchers with vast capital investments in a process, a patent or a trade secret to share their results in the same fashion that they would in a less applied setting...
...Generations, and vast amounts of research and development, have been required to make the link...
...Some universities, especially those in stronger financial positions, have devised administrative mechanisms aimed at maintaining as much of their university personalities as possible in the face of such connections...
...A long and diverse list of biotechnology applications beckons to entrepreneurs, investors and scientists—indeed, to such an extent that the same individuals increasingly occupy all three roles...
...Their constituent members and units are enmeshed with an enormous array of other social institutions and interests, FALL • 1988 • 435 Biotechnology from mediating labor relations to preparing environmental reports to advising farmers on long-range market planning...
...The inefficiency of university institutions and impracticality of university people have always evoked facetiousness —much of it well deserved...
...As of mid-1988, at least three kinds of firms are contending for roles in university-based biotechnology research...
...Can the university act as investment manager toward an organization consisting of its own people, while still maintaining its role as a university...
...By altering genes of bacteria and other creatures, researchers have succeeded in creating qualitatively new substances, often useful as bases for drugs or medical tests...
...But consider a few changes that might help universities protect their special qualities while still providing a setting for needed research: • Separate ownership of biotechnology firms from teaching responsibilities...
...First, a handful of firms like Genentech and Cetus, new and successful companies founded explicitly to develop biotechnology...
...Citizens of the world's industrial nations have learned that their economies are capable both of rapid spurts of growth and of deadening stagnation—often in sharp succession...
...But such prospects raise an extremely ticklish question: How is the university to treat faculty and students associated with such "profit centers...
...But undergraduates enrolling in programs conceived in response to such possibilities should have the same opportunities, or obligations, to study Plato's Republic or Shakespeare's sonnets offered to any undergraduate...
...Medical and pharmaceutical applications have dominated the early commercial development of biotechnology...
...But a curriculum whose only rationale is to provide such infrastructure does not belong in a university...
Vol. 35 • September 1988 • No. 4
