Jennifer Washburn's University Inc.

...DISSENT / Summer 2005 n 123...

...And so, in a field where publication determines advancement, they withhold the results of their research in order to let their corporate sponsors obtain patents on it...

...Some of this may be familiar to those who've been tracking the growing commercialization of higher education...

...After all, it is hard to avoid compunctions about a professional group that offers sessions at its Disney World conference entitled "Make $10 Million with No Money Down," "Getting Value Out of Mice," and "Dirty Little Tricks in Licensing...

...Academic science is eating its seed corn...

...At the moment, however, an even more serious problem than the alienation of future scientists is the distortion of academic research...

...The second-, third-, and fourth-tier institutions that are rushing into these ventures are simply throwing their money away, especially because there is no indication that the biotechnology industry they crave has the potential to stimulate much economic growth...

...But they were also busy setting up private companies...

...Meanwhile, the universities' core educational functions are atrophying...

...We can glimpse the contours of an academic dystopia where, with the exception of a dozen wealthy schools, the nation's colleges and universities will become vocational training centers conducting whatever corporate research they can attract...

...She is the author of Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Little, Brown, 1998) and No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (Oxford, 1986...

...Just as Stanford's scientists supposedly sparked the development of an entire region, so other universities will, with the appropriate inputs, deliver a similar boost to their own locales—or so the techno-fantasists believe...

...As a result, national security considerations have often determined the kind of work that would get done on campus...

...Ninety-eight percent of the industry-funded studies support the drugs they assess, while only 79 percent of the independently funded ones do...

...Federal grants, which covered 73.5 percent of the university's research costs in the 1960s, now cover less than 60 percent...

...Most researchers, Washburn believes, are willing to go along with the drug companies' demand for secrecy: where else are they to get the funding for their work...

...If there are any villains in her story, they are the profit-minded administrators who staff their institutions' technology transfer offices...

...Consider the tragedy of Jesse Gelsinger, the young man who died during a University of Pennsylvania gene therapy trial...

...Public service was, after all, one of the principal justifications for establishing the country's state university system...

...When the corporate sector takes over a laboratory, students and post-doctoral researchers become employees governed by practices, such as maintaining secrecy, that impede their own professional advancement...

...Attempts to deal with such conflicts of interest are treated as attacks on these institutions' academic freedom and autonomy...

...Universities often put their own money into their faculty members' start-up companies, not all of which succeed...

...If the commercialization of the university that Washburn so ably depicts continues, it is hard to imagine that the academy's traditional educational and scholarly work will survive unscathed...

...In some cases, corporations and universities have even tried to suppress people's research...

...Grants that were once almost automatically doled out if the applicant was, as one of my graduate school biologist friends put it, "a serious person who had...

...Stanford and the University of CaliforniaSan Francisco, which together owned the genesplicing patents, profited as well...

...If you are worried about where you are going to get that next billion dollars," a molecular biologist explained, "that's not worrying about how your graduate student is doing...

...Here, the prototype is not Genentech but Silicon Valley...

...One problem is that they don't—and probably can't...

...ELLEN SCHRECKER is a professor of history at Yeshiva University and former editor of ACADEME, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors...

...good ideas," became hard to get, awarded on a "whimsical" or "arbitrary" basis.* Academic science, already a competitive enterprise, turned into a struggle for survival...

...David Kern, a public health investigator, was fired by Brown University after he wrote up his discovery of a new lung disease at the textile plant of a prospective donor...

...Visions of Genentechs soon flooded the nation's campuses...

...That cavalier attitude toward their own pro-corporate behavior, Washburn observes, puts the nation's colleges and universities "on a collision course with many of their own stated goals and ideals," a trajectory that may cause serious damage to their reputation and credibility within the broader public...

...One estimate has it that the two schools raked in some $300 million from the deal...

...DISSENT / Summer 2005 n 121 BOOKS IRONICALLY, THE business community is not clamoring for more commercial activity on campus—despite the conventional (and false) wisdom within academe that corporations will not develop products based on university research unless they receive exclusive rights to it...

...This is not what business wants...

...It was, they claimed, "confidential commercial information...

...Still, we do have to realize that the attendees were under enormous pressure to bring home the bacon...

...Thus it is that mayors, governors, and college presidents devote considerable resources to building research centers and industrial parks in the hopes of luring the biotechnology powerhouses of the future...

...By infusing academic research with bottom-line concerns, these entrepreneurial ventures have, she claims, helped to transform American universities into commercial rather than educational institutions...

...In 1980, Congress facilitated the process by passing the University Small Business Patent Procedures Act (better known as the Bayh-Dole Act), which eliminated most legal obstacles to the patenting of faculty members' federally funded research...

...A few *Mark Ptashne, interviewed by James Watson, September 1997, Lasker Foundation Award, www.laskerfoundation.org/ awards/library/1997b_int_pmall.shtml#1 (accessed April 27, 2005...

...Even so, her account of that process is exceptionally nuanced and wide ranging—especially with regard to its impact on scientific research...

...Similarly lethal misrepresentations occurred in other clinical trials...

...Farmers, businesses, and state and local agencies all profited from academic research, but higher education's main client, at least since the Second World War, has been the federal government, the Defense Department in particular...

...Such secrecy is not conducive to scientific progress...

...One such investment cost Boston University one-fifth of its endowment...

...Berkeley, which received 50 percent of its budget from the state of California in 1980, now gets about 34 percent...

...University administrators looked to the commercialization of their professors' discoveries to offset the decline in public spending, while individual scientists dreamed about start-up companies that would make them rich...

...Almost every recent drugcompany scandal—from the diet supplement Fen-Phen and the arthritis medication Celebrex to the suicides of adolescents on an1 2 2 n DISSENT / Summer 2005 BOOKS tidepressants—resulted from the willingness of academic investigators to withhold or overlook adverse information...

...The situation is most dire in the health sciences, where pharmaceutical companies seem to have skewed the work that they support...

...Moreover, by patenting technical procedures and even biological organisms, the academy is making it increasingly more difficult and expensive to do basic scientific research...

...Nancy Olivieri, a medical professor at the University of Toronto was almost fired for warning her patients about the dangers of an experimental drug...

...Serendipitously, just as the universities were beginning to look for new sources of income, some molecular biologists were finding that their research could be turned into money—big money...

...The storm over Middle East Studies at Columbia and elsewhere, unpopular tuition increases, controversies over affirmative action admissions policies, unionizing graduate students and adjuncts—the list is long and growing...

...Like the rest of our group of graduate students and young faculty members, they worked hard, worried about tenure and promotion, and partied a lot...

...Increasingly, the commercial culture that now pervades so many of the nation's science departments is destroying the mentoring relationship that formed the basis of a traditional scientific education...

...Then, there is the cost of running a technology transfer office, which, because of the legal and technical expertise required, can be quite expensive...

...Although the amount of money that the nation's colleges and universities received from their traditional state and federal funders did not decline, that money covered an ever smaller percentage of those institutions' rising expenses...

...Not only did the researchers have connections to companies involved with the therapy, but they also concealed from the prospective subjects the unfavorable results of an earlier primate study...

...American higher education already has enough troubles...

...Twothirds, in fact, go to just thirteen schools...

...But, as Washburn explains, the industrial booms of the Bay Area's Silicon Valley and Boston's Route 128 depended on a sophisticated economic infrastructure and density of scientific expertise that few other areas can replicate...

...Although Washington remains a major player, it now operates within an academic climate that has become increasingly permeated by corporate values...

...and in some cases it is downright dangerous...

...Businesses commercialized academic discoveries long before Bayh-Dole came into existence, and, as Washburn points out, no one has yet shown that the 1980 legislation made much of a difference...

...The big change occurred in the 1970s, when the postwar economic boom that had bankrolled the expansion of American higher 1 2 0 n DISSENT / Summer 2005 education ended and support for the public sector began to erode, forcing the nation's colleges and universities to confront a new world of scarcity...

...Almost all the dividends from academic science—$1 billion in 2002 alone—accrue to about two dozen top universities...

...In 1973, the Stanford administrator in charge of what we today call "technology transfer" convinced the two scientists who had developed a crucial gene-splicing technique to take out a patent on it...

...Finally, there is the risk involved...

...IT WAS, of course, too good to be true...

...And Betty Dong, a researcher at the University of California-San Francisco, had to wait nine years before publishing a paper showing that an expensive medication was no more effective than a cheaper one...

...To begin with, the median profit from all these ventures is $343,952, of which somewhere between 30 percent and 50 percent goes to the faculty inventors...

...Though clearly outraged about what she describes, Washburn wisely abjures the formulaic anticorporate rhetoric common on the left...

...Nonetheless, for any number of reasons, including a desire for status as well as income, universities tend to overemphasize the commercial value of their faculty members' discoveries...

...One IBM executive told Washburn that academia's most effective technology transfer "is well-trained technical and scientific workers...

...Universities do little to police such misconduct...

...Research scientists, who had grown dependent on the federal government, felt the pressure in an especially virulent fashion...

...Under attack from a coterie of right-wing provocateurs demanding that it adopt a so-called "Academic Bill of Rights" that would impose outside political criteria on curricula and personnel decisions, the academic community is on the defensive in any number of areas...

...BOOKS years later, one of the scientists founded a company, Genentech Inc., to capitalize on his discoveries, a move that turned out to be worth $82 million when he took the company public...

...But the most productive and entrepreneurial scientists, the men and women who attract the most corporate funding, are disengaging from the classroom—often with their institutions' encouragement...

...The figures are sobering...

...They have, it is true, established Institutional Research Boards (IRBs) to monitor the use of human subjects, but half the nation's IRB members consult for pharmaceutical firms...

...She shows little sympathy for them...

...Little did we know that they were riding the crest of the corporate tsunami that has overwhelmed or, as Jennifer Washburn argues, deformed the nation's campuses...

...Of course, American universities have always catered to outside interests...

...The rest see little, if any, payoff...

...Nonetheless, the bonanza mentality persists...

...Sometimes, in fact, they demand such exorbitant fees for the licensing of those discoveries that companies outsource their scientific research to less expensive foreign institutions...

...One study that Washburn cites discovered that 20 percent of the life scientists surveyed delayed publication of their results for more than six months...

...By the late 1970s, all of academe—not just individual scientists—was struggling to survive...

...Citing a litany of horror stories and cautionary tales, Washburn offers a depressing tour of the post–Bayh-Dole campus, where collaboration with the corporate sector has not only provided few rewards but has also begun to sap the very foundations of American science...

...Nor was Berkeley unique: the same financial crisis affected every institution, public or private...

...It is not an inspiring vision...

...Politicians, as well as university administrators, dream of the economic windfalls that academic-corporate partnerships can deliver...

...Olivieri, Kern, and Dong were exceptional in resisting corporate pressures...

...In all these cases, the companies involved put pressure on the universities to silence their researchers and the universities complied, either out of a desire to gain future funding or from fear of a lawsuit...

...Moreover, because politics rather than science determines the criteria for establishing these research centers, they threaten the nation's overall scientific well-being by diverting desperately needed funds from qualified researchers to what is in essence a form of "academic pork...