University Inc. by Washburn, Jennifer
"With the possible exception of business schools, industry penetration into the nations medical schools has been more sweeping than in any other sector of the university". .108
Big Pharma: "..slightly more than a third of the leading authors based at research institutions in Massachusetts had a significant financial interest in their own reports." 108
"...publicly funded science, most of it performed in universities, was a "critical contributor" to the discovery of nearly all of the twenty five most important breakthrough drugs introduced between 1970 and 1995. If university scientists lose their independence, who will perform this path-breaking research and objectively evaluate the safety and effectiveness of drugs already on the market?" 109
More and more companies have the power to initiate and define research protocol..."In this way, industry is slowly changing the direction of academic research, causing it to be far more market driven and less directed toward truly important science." 110
"Journals have devolved into information-laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry." 112
Pharmacia Corp. controlled the data and delivered only the first year to scientists in a two year study..that found it's product produced ulcer complications that were not seen in the first year. 112-3 [must see]
"[In 1998] The NIH [National Institutes of Health] report rebuked the university community for turning its back on the 'gift economy' that traditionally prevailed in academia and replacing it with a new, more profit-oriented conception of knowledge and ideas as private property." 146"
"Historically, of course, one of the central missions of the university was to nurture and protect the information commons, the pool of knowledge and ideas unencumbered by ownership claims that is freely available to researchers and public at large. Like our national parks, timber, and water ressources, this pool of knowledge--much of it funded by U.S. taxpayers--is a crucial part of the public domain. Unfortunately, in recent years, despite the revolution in information technology, the size of the knowledge commons has diminished, as more and more ideas, subject to restrictive patents and licenses, get cordoned off behind high proprietary fences." 146
See "Science in the Private Interest, by Sheldon Krimsky"
Patents give companies monopoly control over the basic building blocks of science: "..the current effort to privatize the knowledge commons "makes the monopolies of the nineteenth-century robber barrons look like penny-ante operations." 148
The reinterpretation of patients based on market ideology has made the human genome, the basic building blocks of our humanity, into a commodity. In such context it is vital that our educational institutions and especially "our nations universities to rededicate themselves to protecting the knowledge commons, so that the basic building blocks of science continue to be freely available for future invention and discovery. Unfortunately, however, the intrusion of a market ideology has caused these institutions to move in precisily the opposite direction." 149
example: in the late 1990's NIH (who had previously criticized this practice) forsaked it's committment to the public domain by filing the first ever patents on anonymous gene fragments, known as "expressed sequence tags (ESTs). Ironically, it was a private firm, Merck & Co. that first rose up to oppose the NIH and its ill-conceived decision to patent such an early-stage genetics information." 149
long term cultural and economic costs: "..waling off of basic, embryonic research behind an exclusive license that isn't absolutely necessary imposes serious, long term costs on the research community--and the broader economy..(see 151 for argument)..Therefore, it is far preferable to place a sizable portion of this non-rival knowledge [knowledge that doesn't operate by a zero-sum game] in the public domain, where it can spur creative competition among scientists and diverse paths of inquiry." 150
Unfortunately, a "growing tendency for universities and their scholars to treat knowledge like a commodity." [what is the root metaphor here?] 151
Grant from the National Institute of Health supported James Thompson while he discovered how to reproduce stem cells, yet the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation WARF got an exceptionally broad patient and gave an exclusive patent to the Geron Corporation..thus producing a monopoly. 151
Response from scientific community: rage: Douglas Melton: "Those conditions would mean that I am the ideal employee of Geron. They don't pay my salary,, they don't pay my benefits, but anything I discover they own..." 152
Although their principle obligation under "Bayh-Dole Act" is to promote utilization, not to maximize financial returns"...most cash-starved universities (because of trickle down ideology) find it impossible not to maximize returns. 156
"A large scale survey by Jerry Thursby and other prominent economists found that university tech transfer officers now list "revenue" as their number one priority--not widespread use of their technology, or even effective commercialization." 156
see p. 159 for professors fighting their Tech transfer offices for the right to "open source" their discoveries. USE INTERNET EXAMPLE AND METAPHOR
Solution: "transfer all publicly financed breakthroughs to a national, non-profit R&D foundation, which would license the research at "arms length" and use teh resulting profits to finance additional public research." 162.
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