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The University-Industrial Complex: A threat to the public funded institution?
1,2Dr Alex Valentine & 1,3 Dr George
Claassen
1 Dept of Journalism, University of Stellenbosch
2 Department of Botany, University of Stellenbosch
3 Science & Technology Editor, Die Burger
REMEMBER WHEN science fiction portrayed certain areas of research as dabbling
in the creation of doomsday monsters? Well, closer to science fact is that over
the past 20 years, research in science has insidiously given rise to a
formidable commercial creature: University-Industrial Complex. This beast is the
offspring of the commercialisation of science at universities and may doom many
of the relevant characteristics of public funded academic institutions.
Amongst some academics there is growing concern about the commercialisation
of science at universities. The traditional roles of public funded institutions
is seen as being: the conscience and critics of society, the education of new
generations and the pursuit of knowledge or truth, free from market forces or
government agendas. The university-industrial complex, amid all its
widely-touted financial benefits, appears to threaten these characteristics that
define a good university. So what is university-industrial complex? It can be
defined as the intimate ties that exist between universities and industrial
enterprises, to the extent that the public accountability of the academic
institution is undermined for profit.
Concerns about the commercialisation of universities began to emerge during
the debate of the late 1970's about the safety issues surrounding the then-new
recombinant DNA technology. The concern centered on the potential influence of
the commercialisation of university research on the university as an institution
(Kenney, 1998). Contractual relationships between academia and industry create
loyalties, or at least vested interests, that restrict a university's freedom of
expression. For example, Nike's funds from the Universities of Michigan, Oregon
and Brown were withdrawn because of student protests against the company's
factory labour practices in developing countries (Warde, 2001). Freeport
MacRonan funds a Chair of Environmental Studies at the University of Tulane yet
is accused of environmental misconduct in Asia, and The Gap supports the
University of California's Berkeley Business School, which uses the company's
case studies in its academic courses (Press and Washburn, 2001).
Nowhere else has the growth and influence of the university-industrial
complex been more visible than in the USA, as illustrated by the biotechnology
industry and its related pharmaceutical applications. The techniques and
products of the biotechnology industry have been commercialized more than any
other academic technology (Kenney, 1998).
Knowledge developed by non-profit academic institutions does not lend itself
readily to commercialisation. However, the past few decades have seen a number
of key decisions that have catalysed the commercialisation of academic research
and the growth of the university-industrial complex. In 1974 the USA National
Institutes of Health consented that universities be allowed to patent and
license their genetic engineering research, freeing government-sponsored
research from any public claims of ownership and thus fostering the
privatisation of government-funded academic research. (Kenney, 1998). The 1980
Bayh-Dole act of the US Congress empowered universities to patent and
commercialise state-funded research at a time when the US economy was weakening
relative to that of Japan, creating a climate in which commercial forces
increasingly dictated universities' educational and academic missions and
ideals. It also led to a massive increase in funding to universities. Between
1980 and 1998, funding for research at US universities increased annually by 8%,
reaching a staggering 1.9 billion US dollars in 1997 (Press & Washburn,
2001). As with all new technologies, it is unlikely that commercial finance was
readily available from the start. Where did the funding initially come from?
The commercialisation of university research in the USA was initially funded
by venture capital firms that arose after the Second World War and have since
grown to a multi-billion dollar financial sector that supports high-risk,
high-reward ventures. Emboldened by the rewards of financing the high-technology
research that generated companies such as Apple Computers, Sun Microsystems,
Lotus and Intel, these firms were primed to gamble on another untried
technology. Their locations near university campuses with strong electronic
engineering faculties placed venture capital firms conveniently close to the
molecular biology laboratories at which many of the early advances in
recombinant DNA technology were made (Kenney, 1998; Wilson, 1985; Florida &
Kenney, 1990).
One of the earliest biotechnology firms in the USA was Genentech, founded by
venture capitalists in 1976. The impetus for Genentech's early commercial
research was supported by the infrastructure of its scientific partner, the
University of California at San Francisco. Genentech's commercial success and
public prominence were ensured by its cloning of a human insulin gene into a
micro-organism and the subsequent licensing of this procedure to the largest
insulin producer in the USA. Despite the steady growth of the biotechnology
industry, the recruitment of top scientific staff from universities was
surprisingly difficult, prompting venture capital firms to create scientific
advisory boards upon which scientists from prominent universities could sit
without compromising their tenured positions (Press & Washburn, 2001)
The commercialisation of biological research has also broadened dramatically
in recent decades. In the 1970's and 1980's, recombinant DNA and monoclonal
antibodies were the main biotechnologies subject to commercialization, but more
recently the health and pharmaceutical industries have capitalized on biological
metabolites, including, liposomes, antisense molecules, peptides, carbohydrates
and stem cells.
Increased commercial funding of universities in the mid-1980's led to the
formalisation of the spirit with which biological materials were exchanged.
University laboratories in the USA required researchers to complete biological
material supply forms to gain access to biological materials. In turn,
universities became more aggressive in patenting and protecting their
intellectual property, leading to greater caution on the part of large
multinational firms that had initially signed very lucrative agreements with
universities in order to gain access to their intellectual property.
The university-industrial complex may compromise academic standards of
research. According to an editorial in the journal Nature (2001), recent
publications in biomedical journals show that company-sponsored researchers more
frequently report results favourable to company products than the reverse,
implying bias. Before the arrival of the university-industrial complex, the
culture of science could be likened to communism, where intellectual property
was freely exchanged and shared and knowledge was generated for the public good.
With industry-sponsored research, there was a shift towards confidentiality and
the practice of allowing the sponsors to manipulate the manuscripts before
publication to serve the interests of the companies. US-based examples include
35% of researchers in engineering which allow their sponsors to manipulate their
manuscripts and a large pharmaceutical company, who removed passages from a
draft publication that their drug may cause strokes and heart failure.
Furthermore, companies may attempt to curtail academic freedoms or
institutionalise their influence at universities. For example, the biotechnology
company Norvatis, is paying the University of California at Berkeley 5 million
US dollars per year for plant research and granting the university access to
company databases. In exchange for seats on university and departmental research
committees and first negotiating rights of up to 30% of all academic discoveries
made by the supported departments. Furthermore, Norvartis has prevented the
academics from discussing this deal, which is an encroachment on academic
freedom (Nature 2001, Press and Washburn, 2001).
Another serious impact of the university-industrial complex is the
price-tagging of science departments, based on how much industrial money they
can attract and the downsizing of humanities faculties. Hunter Rawlings (1999),
the President of Cornell University, recently argued that the new tendency to be
driven by financial considerations can lead to short-sighted favouring of
research fields that show commercial potential and neglect of those that do not.
Humanities disciplines provide serious critique on the influence of science on
global culture, enlarge our worldview and act as the keepers and conveyors of
culture in a democratic society. Since the time of Socrates, the humanities have
been catalysts for social change, providing society with a critical spirit and a
mind set upon argument (Rawlings, 1999). Loss of the humanities would come at
great cost to global society and thus to universities themselves.
Should the role of the university be redefined to keep up with the realities
of global economic changes? Bill Readings (1998) argues that the university has
outlived the purpose defined for it 200 years ago, when it was seen as the
guardian of national culture. Perhaps South African universities are following
the trend described by Readings (1998) for the USA, where universities are now
operating as autonomous bureaucratic institutions and do not care much about the
values of specific ideologies. Instead, they are aimed at generating and
exchanging information that is useful to the corporations and government, those
who call the tune for paying the piper.
The implication of this view is that fundamental research might be curtailed
in favour of more short-term commercially viable options. The danger of this can
be seen in the case of the Nobel Prize winner Paul Berg, whose fundamental
research at Stanford University laid the groundwork for the splicing of DNA and
consequently was one of the main thrusts behind the rising biotechnology
industry. However, shortly after his innovate finding, he discovered that a
scientist at a large pharmaceutical company had been pursuing the same research,
but was prevented by the company from taking the work beyond a certain point.
Berg highlights that this example represents the limitations of corporate
research (Press and Washburn, 2001). Innovative discoveries are more likely to
be published if they arise from fundamental academic research that is free of
industrial obligations.
One should recognise that these impacts on academic institutions may not be
global, at least not yet. There are differences that exist on the campuses
within the developed economies such as Europe and North America. Despite this
difference, it may also seem that the growth of the University-Industrial
Complex sharply follows the divide between universities from developed and
developing economies. But with shrinking budgets in developing economies, this
difference might soon change. In South Africa, with the dwindling size of
government coffers for fundamental research, there has been an increasing trend
to encourage academic research to form tighter bonds with industry and to
commercialise research. This is also evident in the rapid increase of
intellectual property offices at local universities. Although several years
behind for the phenomenon in the USA, the benefit of such a lag is that we can
observe the potential dangers and avert similar conflicts of the history yet to
come.
References cited
Eyal Press and Jennifer Washburn, The Kept Univeristy, The Atlantic Monthly,
March 2000, Volume 285, 3, 39-54
Bill Readings, The university in ruins, Harvard University, 1998
John Wilson, The New Venturers: Inside the high stakes word of venture
capital. Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley, 1985.
Ibrahim Warde, For sale: US academic integrity. Le Monde Diplomatique, March
2001
Richard Florida and Martin Kenney, The breakthrough illusion, New York :
Basic Books, 1990
Martin Kenney, Biotechnology and the creation of a new economic space. In:
Private science: Biotechnology and the rise of molecular sciences A. Thackray
(ed) Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press
Nature, 11 January 2001, Volume 409, nr 6817
Hunter R. Rawlings III, President Cornell University, The role of humanities
in a research university. December 6, 1999.
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