In what has been described as the ideal alliance the biotech corporate contribution is money, expensive equipment, and the skills to market products emerging from university laboratories. The university contributes ideas and traditions of open and shared information, of unimpeded science, but also science coupled to public service. It is now suggested to augment this science, with the assumption that universities working through corporate structures will automatically serve the public interest quicker and better than it otherwise might on its own. The phrase is, "Helping to transform the ideas of the laboratory to the ideas and realities of the marketplace". Unexamined, who could be against such a catalytic relation-ship?
But examination of the historical relationship between fundamental science and technology reveals a good deal more than the ability to hasten a transformation of scientific discovery to a marketable product. An academic process, at best, is represented by an internal balanced relationship between inquiry (how the world works), and technology (methods of measuring) necessary for getting answers. But the technology of the corporate world, in addition, contains an external component that has to do with generating marketable stuff. In both cases the technology can take over the inquiry. The corporate need for technology dedicated to specific products will...must...subvert the scientific need for a holistic research.
Here then is the real danger of the university-corporate "merger"; that the traditional balance of the science-technology relation be tilted in favor of corporate technology need under the guise of a scientific need; a corporate need that must repress new ways of seeing nature. For example, it is already clear that the linear genetic view (the gene of the week syndrome) has for years already repressed the non linear views of life as a complex adaptive system in which genes are made responsive to the epigenetic regulation mentioned above. This situation is only made worse by a corporate technology heavily invested in gene-based diagnostics and drugs for diseases, and genetic engineering tools for redesign of plants and animals all demanding short term rewards. You may isolate, sequence, clone, purify, bottle and sell these "products", but where is the short term profit of a vision of life born of an unexpected (and unwanted) experimental result.
There is no short term in science - only long term. Genetics is only one part of life. Understanding the other part in the form of the complex epigenetic regulation of the genome is going to take many years. Meanwhile, we rush ahead under the corporate imperative to sow millions of acres of cropland with genetically altered seeds; to "engineer" human embryos with genetically altered eggs and sperm; and to diagnose and cure disease with genetic "magic bullets", without taking note that we are doing so with a science only half complete. That is bad and even dangerous science chasing laudable goals of feeding the hungry and curing infant and adult diseases. But in the opinion of many, these goals cannot be achieved through linear genetic thinking alone.
In short, the historical mission of university-based research - to generate new ideas irrespective of their immediately perceived value to society or the corporation - is being severely compromised. When the values of the corporate structure (profits, market share, stockholder satisfaction, image, hype) conflict with the traditional needs of university research, then we begin to see an undermining of the university - because the true relationship between science and technology - the give and take, the interplay, is unbalanced in favor of the corporation.
This shift in emphasis from the question, " What is life?" to "how do we control life to produce useful things?" has already taken place in too many centers of university bioresearch that have been influenced by a need to provide quick fixes to human problems. And no one stands against producing useful things; it's just that we now have to deal with the underlying questions of "who is defining 'the public interest' as served by university re-search? What values are we defining for our students doing the research and living in its midst?"
Richard Strohman is Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley.
Edited version of an article published by The Daily Californian, April 1, 1999
The Watson-Crick Era, which began as a narrowly defined and proper theory and paradigm of the gene, has mistakenly evolved into a theory and a paradigm of life: That is, into a thoroughly molecular form of genetic determinism. The paradigm of the gene stands as a model that has presided over the development of an extremely successful molecular biology that continues to reveal the enormous complexity of living things. As a paradigm of life - genetic determinism, in promising to penetrate and reveal the secrets of life, has extended itself to a level of complexity where it has little power and must eventually fail. The failure is located in the mistaken idea that complex behavior may be traced solely to genetic agents and their surrogate proteins without recourse to the properties originating from the complex and nonlinear interactions of these agents...
The biotechnology business is booming, the Human Genome Project is ahead of schedule, and not a week goes by without the announcement of discovery of a promise (rarely if ever fulfilled in subservient research) for a new gene for this or that complex disease or for some human behavior that might require molecular therapy. Academic biologists and corporate researchers have become indistinguishable, and special awards are now given for collaborations between these two sectors for behavior that used to be cited as a conflict of interest. According to all media reports, genetic determinism is a paradigm whose time is here and now; everyone will get better as their biotherapists become richer.
-Richard C. Strohman
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