Tackling 'Technology Transfer'

For the past several years, a severe decline in federal funding for research has prompted universities to seek alternative sources of money primarily in the private sector. This new thrust to forge relationships between schools and industry, however, carries with it a potential threat to academic freedom. What educators most fear is that researchers will be diverted from the fundamental quest for knowledge to work only on projects resulting in profitable and marketable products.

In response to such concerns, leaders in the government and the business and academic worlds have begun to consider the many issues raised by technology transfer.

Three weeks ago, more than 450 representatives from schools and companies nationwide met in Philadelphia for the largest-ever conference devoted to the topic of industry university relations Hosted by the University of Pennsylvania the gathering was also organized by officials from Cornell. Princeton, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Washington Universities, and the Universities of Michigan and Texas. Also involved were government representatives, and top executives from the corporate boardrooms of IBM. Upjohn, Smithkline Beckmen Centus Dupont, General Electric and Monsanto.

While Harvard did not participate in this meeting the University has played a key role in similar discussions. At a California conference last spring. President Bok and a small group of university officials and corporation executives drafted a set of informal gindelines for research relationships, designed to stimulate wide spread discussion of the tops Harvard which has entered into several multi million dollar pacts is now building on those proposals as it reviews a set of formal rules for future, agreements with business.

What follows are excepts from three presentations made at last month's meeting.

Government's View

Rep. Albert Gore Jr. '69 D Tenn j. chairman of the investigations and Oversights Subcommittee on Science and Technology of the House of Representatives.

The implications of genetic engineering are so staggering as to frustrate efforts to assess them clearly. When the technology of celestral navigation was first systematized by Henry the Navigator, mankind did not know where their ships, so guided, would travel. Similarly, the newly-discovered road map to life itself will undoubtedly lead us to new worlds of which we now have no knowledge. To extend the metaphor. I am arguing that we need to take special care to have in the "crow's nest" someone watching not only for reefs and rocks but also for new land.

Before the end of this century, the human apply cautions of genetic engineering techniques will present us with some of the most difficult questions that have ever confronted mankind. It we can alter our own genetic blueprints, the potential for affecting the future of the human race, as we know it, becomes limitless.

Last month, I held three days of hearings on the scientific, religious, ethical, and societal issues inherent in human genetic engineering. During the hearing it became clear to me that our social, educational, and political institutions are presently unprepared to address these issues and that to a great degree an entirely new body of ethics will be needed to resolve them.

In part, it is the uneasiness, about our lack of preparation for these new questions that has created controversy about how biotechnology is developed, funded, and controlled. And all of these questions are confronted first in the university research community. As a result, we will all be relying heavily on universities to preview these questions with unusual sensitivity.

While in the past public funding has been the most exclusive source of university funds for research in biotechnology, over the last few years we have seen the development of new relationships between some of our most highly esteemed research universities and hospitals and private corporations.

Of course, it is not surprising that in this time of decreasing Federal involvement in basic research programs, universities are turning to private industry for support of important research efforts. Indeed, in some respects, this development is a healthy one and is generally consistent with the historical amalgam of university-industry efforts that has greatly benefited society in other areas. While such ties are in part encouraging, however. I do see several potentially negative aspects of these relationships that I think need to be fully debated. And in some cases, alternative arrangements need to be explored before these two arrangements set precedents that may be injurious.

First of all, if the Congress is to grapple successfully with the unprecedented implications of recombinant DNA research, for which it is still the principle source of funding, we must have a reasonably neutral source of advice on these matters. It would be disastrous if we were unable to receive neutral options from the best minds at universities and other research institutions because they were all on the payrolls of companies that have financial stakes in the outcome of the policy debates. It would be equally troublesome if truly neutral scientists could be found but could not discuss their work because of the financial relationships that their universities had with profit-making entities.

Second, and this concern is different in kind and degree from the others I will discuss, agreements between American research institutions and foreign companies raise the specter of undesirable technology transfer. I don't think of myself as particularly jingoistic or chauvinistic, but I am concerned that many of these initial contracts are with foreign firms. Regardless of our best intentions in the matter, and despite contractual niceties that attempt to respect American patent law, I am concerned that we are too easily allowing our basic research expertise to be converted into foreign profits.

Third, the nature and focus of our research institutions themselves could be dramatically affected by these new agreements. In hearings before my Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee, distinguished scientists expressed their concerns that these agreements could jeopardize the research priorities of institutions and place great strains upon the ethic of scientific openness that has helped to generate our greatest discoveries.

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I believe that the headlong rush of private industry into relationships with universities and research institutions--if not handled carefully--could lead to an erosion of public trust in science, upon which all these enterprises depend. For example, previously, when new scientific break-throughs were announced, there was little concern that our scientists and universities were not operating candidly and in the public interest. But today, unfortunately, there may well be skepticism. When announcements of new "breakthroughs" are made today, one must always wonder whether these "discoveries" are really new or significant or whether they are simply creations of Madison Avenue designed to boost a stock offering on Wall Street. We must be sensitive to these concerns lest the public's support for scientific funding be undermined.

Of course, the best alternative would be increased public funding of research, and I support efforts to accomplish that result.

Moreover, the Federal Government should not be afraid to act, when warranted, to ensure that a balance between innovation and basic research is maintained and that the public interest is not sacrificed to commercial opportunity.

Academia's View

A Bartlett Giamatti president of Yale University.

In this century, the time lag between the creation of a new scientific concept and its general application has usually been measured in decades. Occasionally, however, the gap is compressed as a new theoretical insight moves swiftly to the stage of application and, hence, of wide, practical dissemination. We are now in the throes of such a movement in the vast field of applied research in genetic engineering.

Both university based research, concerned primarily with the advancement of fundamental knowledge, and industry-based research, concerned primarily with marketable application, should serve the general well-being of society albeit in differing ways. Since the knowledge typically developed in university based research is of a fundamental nature, it will often have a multitude of potentially useful applications. Because many of these eventual applications cannot be foreseen, it is particularly appropriate that such knowledge be disseminated as widely as possible so that all may use it if they will. While private industry pursues basic research, it does so less often, in part because it is so difficult to demonstrate adequate financial return from such long-term, risky efforts.

Universities are marketplaces where ideas are freely available; where knowledge is pursued by way of the norms of free discussion and the free access to and exchange of information; and where the freedom to publish must obtain. In contrast to the university, the commercial enterprise is appropriately animated by the profit motive. Commercial application of new knowledge typically requires a substantial investment in applied research and development, and commonly in the equipment and physical plant required by new products or methods of production. A profitmaking enterprise will undertake such an investment, and all its associated risks, only when it can reasonably expect an adequate return, a return not likely to occur if competitors are first to the marketplace. The opportunity for private profit provides the encouragement for the socially beneficial application of new technology. To realize profits from technological innovation, however, a company must strive to protect its proprietary knowledge and to prevent its exploitation by commercial competitors.

The development of theoretical concepts, born in the university, and the transformation by industry of those concepts into practical application, is often a complementary process. The complementary nature of their activities, however, simply throws into relief the basic difference between universities and industries the academic imperative to seek knowledge objectively and in share it openly and freely; and the industrial imperative to garner a profit, which frequently creates the incentive to treat knowledge as private property.

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There are potential conflicts of commitment and potential conflicts of interest whenever a member of the faculty is involved with extra-university entities. Let us here-consider the specific issues surrounding the involvement of a member of the faculty with a company seeking to export university based research.

I doubt that a faculty member can ordinarily devote the time and energy the university requires and also pursue a substantial involvement in any such outside company. Such involvement necessarily demands great concentration and commitment, particularly at the outset or if business goes badly. When a faculty member becomes substantially involved in a company, the conflict in norms governing the dissemination of knowledge becomes very difficult to reconcile. The burden of maintaining a teaching program and two separate research programs, where the results of one research program are to be widely disseminated and the results of the other may be required to be kept secret in the pursuit of commercial success, is more than even the most responsible faculty member can be expected to shoulder.

Finally, such involvement risks putting one's students and research associates in ambiguous circumstances, such that the graduate or postdoctoral student would not know, when working with a professor, for whom the student was working--the university, the professor or the company. Of all members of the university community, the student especially ought to be working for himself or herself, and ought to be guided in research and trained in skills and techniques that are designed to produce a first-rate scholar, not profit for a company in the private sector.

Industry's View

William O. Baker, retired chairman of the board. Bell Telephone Laboratories:

The academic research enterprise in science and technology is for the generation of knowledge, while industry depends heavily on the use of knowledge. In each of these exertions, the actions leading to the desired result are adapted to the environs, so that military organization and discipline act on the basis of information very differently than the marketing of soap or the manufacture of computers. Similarly in education, knowledge is expertly and often traditionally organized for transfer so it can go from one set of minds and records to another.

In view of these conditions connecting knowledge and action, we emphasize to this conference that drastic and basic changes in both the organizing of knowledge, and the actions which it will energize, are hard upon us in a free enterprise society. The abundance of discussions and studies on university-industry combinations has brought out the heartening recognition that we should know more and act smarter than we do. But the ways of acting smarter, specifically by knowing more, which is what industry might hope to achieve by university conjunction, are not so easy. This is especially because the organizing of knowledge that industry requires and has long extracted from its own R&D, is a continuum between basic discovery and final manufacturing or applications engineering, with a huge component of development and engineering technology comprising its midsection.

Academic knowledge organization, however, abhors a continuum. It is usually constructed on departmental lines, where there is elegant discipline identification, often for good reasons of quality control. This identification separates basic chemistry from mathematical statistics and solid state physics, from process metallurgy and biogenetics from plant nutrition and so on. Now everyone says that it just remains for a good systems engineer or industrial technologist to integrate all these good sources of academic research and inquiry, and a new effective continuum can be synthesized.

The trouble is that there are often fundamental gaps in the knowledge, and of course, usually vast vacancies in the developmental and technological phases of it, so that a false continuum is produced. This occupational disease of the business planner, the production engineer or even the entrepreneur, must be treated decisively with the most modern therapy. It appears that we can progressively identify and perhaps even avoid these discontinuities by various ways of organizing knowledge so that the discontinuities are early recognized. Then perhaps they may even be pursued in academic context, or at least not ignored through to the time of commercialization, as happens so often in product recalls, defective automobile litigation, drug liabilities and many other commercial technical stumbles.