Germinating access

Berkeley department's big deal with firm aimed at speeding genetic finds to market

Novartis Buys UC Berkeley

CHARLES W. PETIT / US News and World Report 26oct98

Berkeley dean Gordon Rausser with barley, one of the food crops under study. Photo: DAVID BUTOW--SABA FOR USN&WR

The growing entanglement of biotechnology researchers and university scientists reached a new level last week as the University of California--Berkeley neared completion of an unprecedented deal to sell access to an entire department. For $25 million upfront for new campus laboratories and $25 million in research funds over the next five years, the Swiss-based biotech giant Novartis gets to observe the work of 32 faculty members and nearly 200 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology. Novartis also gets first crack at negotiating the rights to take the department's discoveries to market.

Novartis, with nearly $22 billion in sales last year in the agricultural and health fields, is the world's second-biggest supplier of seeds for farmers. It is trying to develop crops that are more nutritious, grow faster, and are safer (such as peanuts that don't trigger allergic reactions). Increasingly, Novartis and other biotechnology companies have been striking deals with individual university scientists. But devoting a whole department to a single patron is novel, and it rubs many on the sprawling campus the wrong way. "There is a troubling feeling that this could put broad influence on the department to redirect its academic activity to please a private company," says Robert Spear, a professor of environmental health and vice chairman of the campus's faculty senate. Gordon Rausser, dean of the College of Natural Resources and the man who put the deal together, says that working with one company, rather than with many, is actually easier to do. When many professors are on contract to different companies, "they agree not to share information with colleagues working down the hall . . . . That destroys the kind of synergies that a department like this depends upon."

The partnership, while more audacious than most, is typical of the way biotech research works now. Industry is amassing huge quantities of proprietary data on plant and animal genes, more than firms can analyze themselves. The collaborations give companies the benefit of elite brainpower, while the scholars get access to rich troves of data that they couldn't afford to produce on their own.

Steven Briggs, president of the Novartis division that will work with Berkeley, said he won't meddle in how the campus department is run. He likes it the way it is. "We think they [at Berkeley] are the smartest people around."