Fighting cavities with M&M's

Dr. Carroll M. Williams, Bussey Professor of Biology, will be looking for new ways of exterminating 3000 harmful species of insects this year with the $69,000 in federal research money he recently received.

Williams, who has never suffered from lack of funding in this type of research, is working on what he calls a third generation pesticide--following the first two generations of arsenate of lead and DDT--that is unusual because it is non-toxic to mammals and is biodegradable.

James H. Shaw, professor of Nutrition at the School of Dental Medicine, is being given $32,000 by the candy company M&M-Mars to investigate the cavity-causing potential of certain candies produced by the company so that substitutes may be made to manufacture candies less harmful to teeth.

Shaw says it's too early for him to draw any conclusions from his research, which he has been doing for more than a year and which involves laboratory experiments with rats. He feeds the rats a well-balanced diet for part of the day and then candy bars for the rest of the day to get data which will help determine the cavity-causing potential of a Mars bar.

Williams and Shaw's research represents only a very small portion of the total funds researchers at Harvard receive. Last year, one-third of Harvard's overhead costs, approximately $68 million, was paid through research contracts and grants, both federal and private.

It takes 32 people in the Office of Research Contracts (ORC) on the fourth floor of Holyoke Center to administer all these funds. The office, run by Merton C. Barstow Jr., handles the legal and administrative side of research funds for all ten faculties in the University.

"We want to make sure that we're getting into an arrangement that we can afford," Barstow said. "The University's concern is that it be reimbursed. If the University had money for research it wouldn't have to ask for money."

The ORC works out the formal legal obligations for cost sharing between the sponsor and the University, according to Barstow. A typical agreement would involve the sponsor putting up 95 per cent of the funding for a project with Harvard kicking in the last five per cent.

Since research funding is arranged through the ORC, that office handles the incoming money for the researcher placing it in accounts for the researchers so that they never have to deal with cash, Judith O. Semper, assistant director of ORC, says.

In addition to purely financial negotiations, Barstow says that his office makes sure the terms of any research contract do not contradict the University's policies.

"The basic problem we have to be concerned about is right to publish. Harvard doesn't allow any classified research. Sometimes the government wants to have the right to censor or edit manuscripts," Barstow says.

When a government agency does ask for the right to edit or censor research results, ORC negotiators "try to persuade the government against it. The task of the negotiators is to get rid of publication restrictions or anything that makes doing research difficult for researchers," Barstow says.

The ORC is constantly at work trying to resolve clauses in contracts which permit the government project officer to redirect research.

Barstow said that in one case negotiations with HEW over a clause calling for "technical direction" lasted a year before the government agreed to change it to a milder form allowing HEW to have "technical monitoring" rights, Semper says.

Shaw, like most Faculty members, is appreciative of Harvard's insistence on academic freedom. "I'm in a more secure place to be accepting money than in any other institution," Shaw says. "ORC protects the Faculty to an unusual degree...my hands would've been tied (when doing the M&M-Mars research) more if it weren't for the University policy," he adds.

Since 1970 ORC has had guidelines for negotiating contracts. The Report of the Committee on Criteria for Acceptance of Sponsored Research in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences sets up seven principles to which research agreements must conform. The report calls for guarantees of freedom to publish results, and prohibition of research "which carries security classification, or requires security clearance of University personnel."

"The original report was written during a time of substantial transition in the federal government," Richard G. Leahy, associate dean of the Faculty for resources and planning and a member of the committee that wrote the report, says. "We felt that we ought to revise and codify the ground rules under which we'd agree to sponsor research," he adds.

Leahy says that in 1969, when the committee started the report, President Johnson was faced with expenditure limitations and Harvard wanted to set down rules which would guarantee that the government paid all promised money. He says that there was no student pressure on Harvard to come up with guidelines similar to those the committee drew up.

"Recently, encroaching government regulation has been of great concern," Leahy says, adding "It's trend that will run into the wall of academic freedom."

Harvard's insistence on complete academic freedom has lost the University a few contracts and has undoubtedly frustrated many government negotiators. But not too much--Harvard ranks among the top ten universities which receive government contract and grant expenditures. The bulk of Harvard's research money--nearly $45 million--comes for HEW. A little more than $2 million--about three per cent of the total funds from the government--comes from the Army, Navy and Air Force.

The biggest chunk of government research funds went to the Medical School last year. Med School researchers had more than $25 million to work with last year, 94 per cent of which came from the United States Public Health Service. Research monies make up more than 80 per cent of the Med School's operating costs.

The ORC has a black loose-leaf notebook filled with records of research contracts and grants for projects in the University's ten faculties. All the projects are public and anyone interested can find out the type of research a professor is doing, how much money he has to work with and how long he has been doing the research. Rules like this guarantee that no classified research is done at Harvard.

ORC has no say over whether research grants are accepted or rejected, nor over the type of research project undertaken. (Those decisions are made by the individual researchers when they apply for grants and the research committees of each academic department.) But most of the research at Harvard tends to be in the sciences.

"That's the way it's developed over the years," Barstow says, explaining the dominance of scientific research at Harvard. "Congress hasn't perceived a willingness by the taxpayers to pay for non-essentials, such as art, history or music. Only recently has Congress been appropriating money in the arts and humanities."

Richard Wilson, professor of Physics, is one Harvard faculty member very involved in the type of project ORC typically handles.

Wilson is a high-energy physicist, who for the past decade has received approximately $1.25 million in research monies every year from the Energy Research Development Agency (ERDA).

Through the grant, he and his three colleagues have been trying to determine the structure of elementary particles--protons, neutrons and electrons--research that Wilson admits doesn't have any known application at present.

This semester he will be jetting around the country to oversee some of his research, in addition to lecturing three times a week. Part of the plane hopping involves a trip to the Fermi Laboratory in Chicago every other weekend.

Barstow says that this type of off-campus research is "reasonably common," although he added that "a clear preponderance of governmental research is on-campus, in the Faculty of Arts and Science and the Med School."

Wilson says that in his work with research grants he has not found that ORC reduced the red tape as Barstow asserts.

"Their very existence creates red tape," he says. "They're not as good as they should be. They can't keep accounts the way the agencies want them kept. I have had to bypass them quite often," he says.

Williams said that he has had a lot of experience preparing applications but that for researchers who have not, ORC does not offer much help or guidance.

Shaw also says he finds ORC easy to work with. "I found them very helpful and understanding. They take a lot of the business negotiations off my back and appropriately apply University policies which they are very familiar with," he says.

Professor Williams, on the other hand, has a much more favorable reaction to dealing with ORC. "They have handled their side and I have handled mine. They give me prompt cooperation in preparing applications for grants," he says. "I'm reasonably happy with the situation.