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Morning panel:

In this presentation I shall draw liberally on the 1984 Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Commercialization of Scientific Research entitled The Science Business. As a member of that task force I had the opportunity to participate in their extensive study of the problems presented by relationships between industry and academia.

Although the

report focuses on molecular biology as its model, the task force also considered other fields ranging from robotics to the oil industry. First, let us consider some of the fundamental values of the uni

versity

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particularly those values that may be threatened by relationships with industry. Those identified by the Task Force are:

1. There should be a free exchange of information and ideas within
Students and faculty should all have access to

the university community.

these ideas and information.

2. There should be a freedom to pursue knowledge for its own sake because it is interesting or because it is valued by the community of colleagues.

3. There should be an appropriate balance within the university of effort devoted to the sciences, arts, and humanities.

4. Members of the faculty should be available to provide "disinterested" advice to federal, state, and local governments on public policy issues.

These are ideals, not norms. We do not pretend that we live in perfect harmony with these ideals. Rather, they serve as reminders of what we should be striving for. As we consider new relationships or policies, we should keep

in mind that we should resist those that threaten our efforts to aspire to

these ideals.

Before I go on, I wish to address the sentimental notion that the university is an ivory tower, a place where scholars pursue the development of new knowledge and its transmission to the next generation unburdened by the cares of the real world. While the university does provide a haven for people who, for the most part, work and live according to that model cidentally, a life style that I cherish it is also a marketplace. This is

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not news (see Caplow, T. and McGee, R.J.: The Academic Marketplace, Doubleday, 1958). We compete for recognition by students and peers, for laboratory space, for tenure, and so on. These are among the traditional coins of the academic realm. Among our metaphors there is the familiar "publish or perish;" in the divinity school it is "publish or parish;" in the medical school, "publish or practice."

We also compete for money in such forms as grants and contracts from the federal government and patronage from philanthropists (including industry). We compete in the real world for consulting fees (e.g., schools of law, business, architecture), professional fees (e.g., schools of medicine, drama) and through marketing of our patented inventions (e.g., engineering, molecular biology).

We fear that as has happened so often in the past, the will of the patron will dominate the art and science. Consider the influence of the patron on the content of votive paintings during the Renaissance. After he left his post as Assistant Secretary of Health, Dr. Theodore Cooper, now Executive Vice-President, Upjohn Corporation, gave a speech to academic physicians and

scientists in which he pointed out the perils of patronage. As he observed, the federal government began by patronizing research and education and then proceeded to dictate medical school admissions policies and curriculum content. Although medical schools were delighted with the early patronage they were perturbed

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to say the least by the later developments. He warned that

the same could happen if industry became the dominant patron.

With regard to the overall problem at hand, the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force observed (p.4):

"Ties between the scientific community and corporations, and between corporations and universities, are not, of course, new. Such ties are one

But the new re

reason for the continued supremacy of American science. lationships differ in magnitude and extent from past relationships, introducing the possibility of conflicts of interest. This danger has been recognized at many universities, which have been holding internal debates over the new relationships. It also has been the subject of various summit meetings of university leaders.... In addition, various new guidelines have been proposed by such interested groups as the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association of University Professors, and the American Civil Liberties Union (which was concerned that corporate-university agreements might curtail freedom of speech).

"This Task Force does not think that radical changes are called for. Rather, we have formulated a number of proposals that we consider both flexible enough and resilient enough to protect the independence and freedom of the scientific and academic communities in dealing with government and

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of biotechnology may be a blessing in that it tests relations that have grown up, in many cases casually or ad hoc, and forces us to analyze them carefully."

Key recommendations of the Task Force focus on disclosure:

"To prevent abuses or conflicts of interest, the Task Force believes the faculty members should be required to disclose their relevant commercial connections to their department chairmen or other designated officials."

(p.12)

"To guarantee students their freedom, the Task Force believes that professors must fully disclose outside sponsorship to students, graduate and undergraduate, directly involved in research projects with those professors. Furthermore, the professors must define for their students procedures that will be used to determine who will be named inventors on patents that may result from the research." (p.13)

There are other specific recommendations addressed to specific threats; for example: "This Task Force believes that the dangers implicit in a university taking an equity position in any company that is operated by or for some of its faculty are so great that such actions must be prohibited." (p.13)

...

the Task Force believes strongly that it is ill-advised for a company to capture a whole field within a university or, for that matter, a department." (p.15)

Now I shall address some specific questions posed by your staff about relations between academia and industry.

1. Do such relations inhibit the flow of information within the uni

versity community?

Yes, they may.

However, as the Task Force observed (p.7): "Another

string attached to some government contracts places conditions on the disclosure of discoveries. So, just as research projects supported by industry can be "classified" for proprietary reasons, projects supported by government can be classified for security reasons.

"The Corson report of the National Academy of Sciences highlights just The DOD floated the idea that in the future it would have to

such a case.

give its approval before the findings of research it had sponsored could be published in journals. A possible consequence might be that a graduate student whose support came from the DOD would not know whether his thesis research could be published, a situation that students and universities would find intolerable."

The Task Force addressed this problem in its recommendations stating its belief

(p.14).

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that agreements that prohibit publication pose great danger."

Thus, it is not only industry that calls for secrecy within the university environment. Moreover, DOD is not the only federal agency that may

call for secrecy.

Many universities including Yale have policies prohibit

ing research sponsorship by any agency that requires curtailment of publiBrief periods of delay (up to 45-90 days) are tolerated so that

cation.

sponsors may review prospective publications for, e.g., patentable inventions. Veto power, however, is generally precluded.

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