Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism , Daniel S. Greenberg , U. Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007. $25.00 (324 pp.). ISBN 978-0-226-30625-4
Daniel S. Greenberg’s Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism offers a sweeping analysis of the complex and at times disturbing relationships among science, government, industry, and politics. In recent decades, academia’s unending search for revenue has expanded beyond government subsidies, tuition, endowment income, donations, and research grants to encompass a relatively new prospect: harvesting intellectual property for financial gain. Greenberg, a distinguished science journalist, examines that development and its consequences.
Some academic institutions have long exploited the fruits of their research. For example, the University of Wisconsin created a foundation to manage its patent for vitamin-D synthesis in 1925. But university interest in intellectual property expanded greatly following passage of the Bayh–Dole Act in 1980. This law gave universities and faculty a clear title to discoveries made with help from federal funds, the largest source of research support. But it imposed a duty to license those discoveries to industry, preferentially small businesses. In the ensuing years, links with established for-profit firms expanded, and academic-startup companies proliferated. At some institutions, entrepreneurship became another faculty responsibility, along with teaching, research, and service. Industrial support for university research, however, led to disputes over intellectual property ownership, research independence, and publication of results, and it rarely exceeded more than a small percentage of an institution’s total research funding.
The pharmaceutical industry, among others, developed a different model for technology acquisition. Some large manufacturers have stopped or reduced support for in-house research, as well as research at universities. Instead, universities perform the research, mainly with government support. They license the resulting intellectual property to academic startups and also may take an ownership interest. Following successful commercialization, large enterprises may buy those smaller companies. The cost, although a bonanza for a faculty entrepreneur and a revenue bonus for an institution, is a minor entry on a large corporation’s balance sheet. Meanwhile, the corporation’s access to technology is greatly expanded while its business risk is reduced.
For universities and researchers, risks are higher and returns are lower. Few discoveries have great commercial potential, and only a few major projects can be completed during a research career. In 2003, the nearly 200 US respondents to an Association of University Technology Managers survey of member institutions received an average licensing income of $7.3 million; the top five received more than $65 million each. But their total research support from 1991 through 2002, if invested in long-term US Department of Treasury bonds, would have yielded an average income of $93 million per institution, risk-free. Thus as a direct financial investment, commercialization of university research is rarely worthwhile, and the main value of the research must be sought for its broader, societal benefits. The long odds seem not to inhibit administrators, or scientists bent on commercialization. As with the lottery, even if the statistical return on investment is negative, the cost to play seems insignificant compared to the promise of the prize.
Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Presidential report Science, The Endless Frontier (US Government Printing Office) provided the main policy basis for federal support of university scientific research following World War II. Bush argued that federal support should offer the university investigator “an opportunity for free, untrammeled study of nature, in the directions and by the methods suggested by his interest, curiosity, and imagination.” Advances in national security and economic well-being would follow naturally, although in unpredictable ways. But some policymakers and university officials believe that directions in scientific research are too important to be left to scientists. They think that the process of discovery should be managed in order to increase its commercial value—often in fields that have been found profitable already. A Greenberg interview with former Stanford University president Donald Kennedy provides a counterexample. Before Google, Stanford’s top intellectual-property moneymaker was a patent for gene splicing. The second, Kennedy said, “came from the music department, and it’s the chip that goes in Yamaha synthesizers. Who would have thought?” (pages 35 and 36).
Where the prospect of wealth enters, conflicts of interest abound. Positive outcomes may be reported widely while adverse findings are de-emphasized and null results left unpublished. Scientists lend their prestige to products and receive consulting or lecture fees. Situations involving human subjects are the most serious. In 1999 teenage volunteer Jesse Gelsinger died during a clinical trial at the University of Pennsylvania. Greenberg reports that the youth had been treated with a genetically engineered virus whose known serious side effects had not been adequately revealed despite extensive federal regulations and reporting requirements for human trials. According to Greenberg, both lead scientist James M. Wilson and the university had financial stakes in the research (pages 104–106).
Greenberg’s research is extensive. His knowledge of the institutions, policymakers, and industries involved in the development of marketable science, and their effects on the science community and public policy, is vast. Frequent citations, albeit sometimes to the author’s unpublished interviews, accompany each chapter. However, the book’s presentation can be confusing. Facts, events, and anecdotes sometimes intersect in ways that are hard to follow. Topics presented in one place may be revisited in another with little continuity. The editing deficiencies are exacerbated by vague chapter titles and an incomplete index. For example, chapter 6, “Conflicts and Interests,” discusses conflicts of interest, but chapter 7, “A New Regime,” discusses more of the same. The important subject of institutional conflicts of interest first appears in chapter 7 under the section heading “The Other Conflict of Interest.” The discussion continues under the same heading four sections later. The index does not list “conflicts of interest,” the focus of much of the book, but does include “institutional conflicts of interest.”
Many of Greenberg’s examples, including six extended conversations that comprise the book’s Part 2, pertain to the biomedical sciences. Some difficulties he describes—the complex ethical issues involved in human-subject research, extensive regulations, and massive documentation requirements—are issues that physical scientists rarely encounter. Thus those scientists may infer that the book is not relevant to them. They should not. Results in the physical sciences can have enormous human and societal impacts and can raise knotty moral problems, as history has shown. Science for Sale is a cautionary tale that should provoke thoughtful discussions among researchers and academic administrators.
