A Vilified Corporate Partnership Produces Little Change (Except Better Facilities)

Critics of the Berkeley-Novartis pact can’t point to business intrusions, but fears persist

Berkeley-Novartis. Berkeley-Novartis. Berkeley-Novartis.

For nearly three years, this shorthand has been a rallying

cry for watchdogs who fear the growth of corporate influence at universities.

The $25-million “strategic alliance” between the plant-biology department at the University of California campus here and a multinational life-sciences company based in Switzerland has been pilloried since the day it was announced.

Berkeley-Novartis was the centerpiece of The Atlantic Monthly’s March 2000 cover story on corporate intrusion in academe, “The Kept University.” Two months later it was the focus of an extensive hearing in the California State Senate. It appeared as Exhibit A in a Nature editorial this year asking, “Is the university-industry complex out of control?” The American Association of University Professors has weighed in as well, warning just last month that arrangements like Berkeley-Novartis could distort students’ priorities and compromise scientific openness.

Yet if those newly flush biologists and plant-genomics specialists at Berkeley could devise a scientific technique to test for corporate influence, their findings might surprise the critics.

Berkeley-Novartis may not be an innocent -- even most of its supporters say the midpoint of the five-year relationship is far too early to declare that.

But there’s a powerful case to be made, based both on what the agreement says and on the day-to-day reality of the arrangement, that Berkeley-Novartis, although larger than most such deals, is no more nefarious than the countless other sponsored-research agreements that universities and companies sign every day.

In some ways, it may be a lot better.

Under its terms, the company pays Berkeley $5-million a year. In return, it gets a first look at virtually all of the research produced by most of the faculty members in the department of plant and microbial biology, along with first rights to license a share of what they invent.

The $5-million has been a financial blessing for Berkeley. It allows the College of Natural Resources to save money for sorely needed improvements to older laboratory-and-classroom buildings. It also provides the department with resources to increase the number of graduate students it can accept.

Most important, according to the 23 professors who have chosen to participate, and their 60-some graduate students, the deal creates a pool of money for basic, unconventional research of their own choosing, in a way that no grant from the government, a company, or even a foundation ever would.

“I cannot see anything commercial in the work I do,” says Lewis J. Feldman, a professor of biology. But the $75,000-a-year stipend that he gets from the arrangement allows him to carry his research into new areas. He is exploring the effects of gravity on plant roots. Initially skeptical of the deal, he was concerned that it might impinge on graduate students’ freedom. But so far, he says, “Novartis has pretty much left us alone.”

The five-year agreement, which began in November 1998, has created some unusual issues, which continue to trouble its many critics.

Some question the sponsor’s broad rights to review, though not alter, publications -- including, soon, the dissertations of doctoral students before they are published. Others question whether the department, known as P.M.B., has become overly dependent on money from the deal to support its graduate program. Critics also argue that a departmentwide agreement of this sort so institutionalizes a relationship that the objectivity of the researchers involved is inevitably compromised, however much they claim to be independent.

Protections for the academic freedom of individual members of the department are fine as far as they go but fail to deal with the broader implications of relationships like this, says David Noble, an active critic of corporatization at universities, who flayed the agreement in a 1999 speech here.

A historian at York University, in Toronto, he says such relationships give companies a chance to profit from an academic research establishment built largely with public money. “They have socialized the costs and the risks -- because the taxpayer is paying -- and privatized the benefits,” Mr. Noble argues. “The fact that the faculty believe that they’re doing what they want, that there are not strings attached, is just effective research management” by the sponsors. He maintains that the deal makes the department “captive” to the company -- and, like other critics, says the real danger is in the potential for indiscernible corporate influence.

But while critics continue to warn about potential dangers, none of the dozens of Berkeley graduate students and professors, or plant-biology colleagues at other institutions, or outside critics interviewed by The Chronicle noted a single instance in which the Novartis deal has overtly compromised research at Berkeley.

That’s not to say the arrangement hasn’t taken its toll on the College of Natural Resources.

Because the deal is perceived as a vehicle to promote research on genetically modified foods, an issue on which passions run strong in the college, it has frayed the already strained collegiality among departments.

In November 1999, corn plants grown by a student in the department were toppled in a “crop trashing” meant as a protest against the deal. The incident set back the student’s research by a year. A graduate student in another department of the college who had been a vocal critic of the deal found himself accused of the vandalism by professors and students from P.M.B.

David Quist, the accused student, says he had nothing to do with the vandalism and nothing formal came of the suspicion, but now feels an “air of mistrust” that keeps him from conferring with students and professors.

Advocates of the deal, most notably Gordon Rausser, former dean of the College of Natural Resources, have touted Berkeley-Novartis as a landmark, maintaining that it lifted the concept of university-industry relationships “to a new level.”

But other observers, from graduate students in the department to Clark Kerr, former chancellor of the University of California system, are worried. The Novartis agreement, because of its notoriety, will be carefully monitored, they note, but similar deals in the future may not be. “At a place like Berkeley, the situation is much more likely to go well than it would at lesser places, where faculty aren’t as sure of themselves,” says Mr. Kerr. “I’m much more concerned about Novartis II and Novartis III.”

Partisans on both sides of the debate are also critical of the Berkeley administration’s handling of the controversy. Jason Delborne, for one, who with Mr. Quist and others founded Students for Responsible Research, notes that Chancellor Robert Berdahl pledged to the Academic Senate that the university would treat the agreement like an experiment, assessing whether it subtly affected the department’s research.

But aside from a survey of P.M.B. graduate students’ attitudes about the agreement and some catch-as-catch-can fact-gathering by a faculty member hired by the Academic Senate with money from the chancellor’s office, no one seems to be systematically collecting base-line data. “We seem to have fouled that up pretty good,” says Mr. Delborne. A graduate student in another part of the college, he contends that Berkeley isn’t doing enough to study the social, cultural, and economic implications of agricultural biotechnology.

P.M.B. students, meanwhile, say they wish that the college had been more forthright about the agreement from the start, so that they wouldn’t have to spend so much time trying to defend themselves to classmates outside the department.

“Other than maybe taking a riskier approach to the same old problem, nothing has changed” in the research because of the deal, says Jennifer Johnson, who just received her Ph.D. Her lab is part of the agreement. Not enough professors have talked about the research freedom allowed by the deal, she says. Nor have they done enough to publicize simple things like how the money is allocated and how many patent applications have come out of the research.

Ms. Johnson was one of six students who wrote a response to the Nature editorial, defending the arrangement and pointing out two misstatements of fact in the piece. (Two other letters, from professors in the department and from Mr. Rausser, were not published.)

A few months ago, the department did establish a Web site (http://plantbio.berkeley.edu/PMB-TMRI) with information about the agreement and some of the research it supports.

And Mr. Berdahl says an evaluation of the alliance is soon to get under way. In December he appointed a committee for that purpose. It is now searching nationally for a distinguished social scientist to conduct the review.

But the committee’s chairman, Michael Teitz, notes that conducting an evaluation will be difficult. The agreement has stirred strong emotions and involves complex issues. “There are clearly some limitations on what can be done,” because of insufficient base-line data, he says. “I wouldn’t expect any miracles here.”

Meanwhile, Berkeley’s “Novartis deal” is no longer with Novartis.

In November 2000, Novartis and another life-sciences multinational, Zeneca, each spun off their agricultural-business units and merged them to form the world’s biggest agribusiness, Syngenta. In January, the Swiss-based Syngenta bought the research institute that had been created by Novartis and was Berkeley’s actual partner in the deal. The unit -- based in La Jolla, Calif., and now known as the Torrey Mesa Research Institute -- continues with its original mission of developing plant-based solutions to problems in human and animal health. Out of habit and convenience, though, many still refer to the “Novartis agreement.”

Whatever the perception outside Berkeley’s plant-and-microbial-biology department, enthusiasm for the deal is palpable here at Koshland Hall, ground zero in the great debate. Set against a gentle slope on the northern edge of the campus, the concrete, five-story building is home to the faculty members and students working on such research as the developmental genetics of maize, the effect of photosynthesis on algae, and evolutionary relationships of fungi.

Koshland’s interior lacks the atmospherics of the college’s more-historic buildings, where the hallways are decorated with emblems of its agricultural and forestry traditions: planks of wood and displays of soil samples from far-off corners of the world. But it makes up for any lack of charm with its modern laboratories and state-of-the art equipment -- some of it acquired with the help of Novartis money.

A $400,000 laser-scanning microscope, which allows scientists to generate optical images of cells and reconstruct them into digital 3-D models, is a particular source of pride. It is available to researchers from outside the department, as are several $25,000 low-light cameras which can be attached to microscopes to detect light emissions from cells.

Not everyone here partakes of Syngenta’s largess.

Four of the department’s 27 full-time faculty members don’t participate in the deal and so do not receive a share of the annual $5-million but also are not required to show Syngenta their research. Two abstain on principle: Donald Kaplan says the agreement contributes to a research culture that is already overly dependent on money as a measure of success. Richard Malkin -- the interim dean of the college, who, because he is nearing retirement, is phasing out his work with graduate students -- says he fears that the emphasis on research undermines the importance of teaching. He is also uncomfortable with provisions of the arrangement that allows Syngenta first rights to see publicly financed research, although he notes that the government agencies that provide the money did not object.

The other two non-participants are Steven Brenner and Robert Fischer, both of whom have substantial sources of outside financing, including, in Mr. Fischer’s case, a corporate grant.

Mr. Fischer, who studies the genetics of plant reproduction, says he chose not to sign on because he felt “having more than one company in the lab was not a desirable thing.” Mr. Brenner, a specialist in computational techniques who joined the department in January 2000, says he has not ruled out joining in the future, though he hasn’t examined the terms of the deal closely.

As with the new equipment, Novartis money played a part in bringing Mr. Brenner’s lab to Berkeley, according to Mr. Rausser. With bioinformatics so hot a field, the researcher had generous offers from several other institutions. But under an agreement worked out with Berkeley’s top brass back in 1998, the college gets to keep for itself most of the $1.6-million of “overhead” from the $5-million-a-year grant. That’s the money being banked for building renovations, paying for the expanded P.M.B. graduate program, and, says Mr. Rausser, partly financing the half-million-dollar-plus start-up package that allowed Berkeley to land Mr. Brenner.

Professors financed directly by the deal say it has been a boon to their research, because it gives them money without the need to have done most of the experimentation or collected reams of preliminary data, as is often the case in federal-grant competitions. And they don’t have to go through the time-consuming grant-application process used by federal agencies.

Several of them say the projects financed by the agreement are the kind they would very likely have proposed to the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation.

Every professor who elected to sign onto the agreement gets money; the awards run from $60,000 to $200,000 a year.

Michael Freeling, one of the first Berkeley faculty members to conduct research using Syngenta’s database of the fully sequenced rice genome, says that access is helping him to understand fundamental properties of other grasses, including corn, wheat, and barley. Very few other academic scientists are able to do this work, because the publicly financed version of the complete rice-genome sequence is years from completion. His research, financed with $200,000 a year from the deal, involves the breeding and analysis of mutant plants.

Mr. Freeling, who was singled out as a “corporate sellout,” along with Mr. Rausser and Mr. Berdahl, by the perpetrators of the 1999 crop-trashing incident, says his connection to bioengineered food is no greater than is the particle physicist’s to nuclear-power plants. Novartis, and now Syngenta, hasn’t guided anything, he says. “It was an investment in what we do naturally.” Before signing with Novartis, the department had solicited bids for a similar collaboration from several other companies.

Working with Syngenta’s cutting-edge equipment and expertise is a thrill for many P.M.B. graduate students. Several are consulting with scientists who help them analyze findings from computer-readable gene chips, which show whether particular genes in a sequence are active or inactive.

Graduate students and professors using tools like the gene chips or the rice-genome database must agree not to discuss their work until it’s published. The restriction isn’t a big deal, because most scientists don’t talk about their work in progress anyway, says Michael J. Axtell, who just completed his third-year. “It’s an impetus to publish it,” he says.

For all the support it is giving, Syngenta may, potentially get a lot in return. It has the right to see almost all of the publications and presentations by professors and graduate students before they are made public. Syngenta also has the right to keep from being identified as a sponsor of publicized research, a provision that appears contrary to the movement for greater disclosure of academics’ ties to business in scholarly communications.

Steven Briggs, president of Torrey Mesa (formerly the Novartis institute), says the company has never asked not to be identified and adds, “I can’t imagine we would.” He notes that the right to remove a sponsor’s name is common in industry-financed grants, because companies “may not want to be associated with certain reports,” even if that is not always stated explicitly in agreements.

Abstracts and advance copies of publications and summaries of presentations, about 225 to date, are mailed weekly to Syngenta.

Until recently, dissertations weren’t part of the mix, because the work of doctoral students, most of whom take six years to do their Ph.D.'s, was assumed to have begun before the agreement went into effect. But department officials are now developing procedures for submitting dissertations to Syngenta as well.

At Torrey Mesa, Syngenta has assigned at least one director of research or senior scientist to each faculty member in the Berkeley department, and publications are routed to them for review upon arrival. If they see an idea that interests them commercially, they ask Berkeley to file a patent on it. The university’s Office of Technology Licensing is also obligated to show to Syngenta any inventions brought forward by participating professors or graduate students themselves. Syngenta pays patenting costs for all inventions in which it has expressed an interest.

To date, Torrey Mesa has signed options for licenses on four inventions covered by the deal, with one more contract in the works. At least two relate to ways to improve grains; another has to do with allergens.

The deal also seems to be spurring the department to pay closer attention to the commercial potential of its work. In the fiscal years 1996 and 1997, faculty members reported three patentable inventions each year. The number jumped to nine in 1998 and 10 in 1999, the first year of the agreement. Disclosures totaled 12 in 2000 and 12 so far in the 2001 fiscal year, which ends on June 30. At least a few of those disclosures were prompted by Syngenta’s having spotted ideas in publications it reviewed.

Syngenta doesn’t appear to be driving the research that produced those inventions. When the deal was announced, many people worried that Novartis would be able to influence the direction of research in the department because it has two of the five seats on a committee that decides the size of the grants -- seats it acquired, as it happens, at the request of P.M.B. faculty members. But things haven’t worked out that way, participants say. The first year, they report, only the three Berkeley faculty members on the committee ranked the proposals, and the Novartis representatives assented informally. Ditto for the second year. In year three, one Syngenta representative did join in formally ranking the proposals. According to department officials, his votes were largely in line with those of the faculty members. Berkeley officials denied The Chronicle’s request to see vote tallies, citing privacy rights of the researchers and committee members. Decisions on the fourth-year financing will take place in October.

Jasper Rine, a Berkeley professor chosen from a biology department outside the College of Natural Resources to sit on a committee overseeing the routine workings of the arrangement, says he’s come upon nothing untoward in the way the deal affects P.M.B.'s researchers. “It looks pretty clean. They’re publishing in good places” and collaborating with colleagues elsewhere as much as ever before, he says.

Given the structure of the arrangement, Mr. Rine acknowledges that in the abstract, it’s possible that a professor struggling for research support might tailor a proposal to appeal to Syngenta. But that’s no greater threat to academic freedom, he says, than what a researcher typically faces in seeking grants.

A small sampling of plant biologists at other universities confirms Mr. Rine’s positive sentiments, though several say they are still curious about how the arrangement might affect Berkeley’s department over the long term.

Several say they’d be nervous about this kind of arrangement, because it might alienate other companies. Pioneer Hi-Bred and Monsanto both had big research grants with the Berkeley department before the Novartis agreement, but haven’t initiated any new ones. A Pioneer spokeswoman says it has no comment on whether it would finance further research at Berkeley, because the company doesn’t comment on the activities of competitors. A Monsanto spokesman says that the company finances research on a project-by-project basis, and that it would have no philosophical reason to avoid Berkeley because of the Novartis deal.

Applied Phytologics, which did come to the department with a big grant post-Novartis, says it wasn’t deterred by the agreement. But with more than $1-million of its money on the line, executives made doubly sure that the company would have first rights to license any inventions that might grow out of the research that it was financing. “We don’t want to fund Novartis R&D,” says Todd Stoltz, director of regulatory affairs.

Philip Benfey, a plant biologist at New York University, says the Berkeley department was lucky to land the Novartis agreement. “It’s not the best of times for finding money in plant biology,” he says. But getting support isn’t an end in itself, he adds. “It will be a success if there is strong research that comes out of it and it gets published.”

Success will also be measured by the extent to which graduate students can participate in the community of scholars, by being able to freely communicate with colleagues, he says.

So far, the results are impressive. Reports on research financed through the agreement have appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and such notable journals as The Plant Cell, The Plant Journal, and Plant Physiology. Professors and graduate students have also presented their agreement-financed research at prestigious conferences, including the 2000 meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, the 2001 Plant and Animal Genome Meeting, and the 2000 meeting of the American Society for Virology.

Syngenta seems pleased. Still, Mr. Briggs, the president of the Torrey Mesa Research Institute, says it’s too early to declare the deal a success or failure. “The real collaborative nature of it is just getting under way,” he says. Until recently, the main interactions between the two parties have come in annual retreats, where scientists from P.M.B. and Torrey Mesa talk about their work.

Mr. Briggs says it is also too soon to predict whether Syngenta will want to renew the agreement, pointedly noting that agribusiness -- and therefore the money available for spending on research -- isn’t what it was even three years ago. The slowdown in economies around the world and Europe’s antipathy toward genetically modified foods have taken a great deal of value out of the agribusinesses, he says.

The same controversy over genetically engineered food has given more fuel to critics, who remain concerned about the breadth of the agreement and the way it has publicly linked Berkeley faculty members and students with Novartis, and now with Syngenta.

“Their research legitimizes Novartis,” says Ignacio Chapela, an assistant professor in the department of environmental science, policy, and management at Berkeley. “The P.I.'s [principle investigators] refuse to see the whole picture of what they’re doing.”

When the Food and Drug Administration held a public hearing on genetically modified foods in nearby Oakland in December 1999, he says, several P.M.B. graduate students and faculty members joined in the rallies outside, to help explain misperceptions about biotechnology. He says their credibility was questioned, however, because people knew they were supported by Novartis.

Wilhelm Gruissem, the P.M.B. faculty member who organized the Berkeley group that went to Oakland, and who was also a leader in developing the Novartis agreement, disputes the guilt-by-association argument.

“Just because I’m taking money from a company, my research has to be just as responsible,” he insists. Correcting public misunderstanding “is my responsibility as a scientist.”

Mr. Gruissem, not Mr. Rausser, is considered by many here as the real father of the agreement, even though the former dean has been one of the most active in promoting it. Both have since stepped down from their leadership positions.

Mr. Gruissem now directs a research institute in Zurich financed by the Swiss government, a post he says he took because the opportunity was too good to refuse. Every university-industry relationship needs to be considered on its own terms, he argues, and this one “raised the bar” because it brought corporate support for important basic plant-science research. “It’s much better for us to understand the fundamental processes before some company starts tinkering with them,” he says.

Mr. Rausser, meanwhile, has settled comfortably into his new role out of the limelight.

He’s happy, he says, to have returned to his scholarly interests in agricultural economics and to consulting. He’s also busy writing a book. The working title: Structuring Public-Private Research Agreements.

THE NOVARTIS DEAL

• The company pays $5-million a year for five years to finance basic research in plant biology at the University of California at Berkeley. A five-person committee -- two members from the company and three from the university’s department of plant and microbial biology -- awards money to full-time faculty members.
• The company gets 30 days’ advance notice to review all proposed publications and presentations by participating faculty members and their graduate students. This includes research that may have been paid for by state or federal agencies and other private parties, unless those parties have specifically excluded it. (Usually, sponsors get an early look only at results of the research that they themselves have financed.)
• The company can ask Berkeley to file patents (at the company’s expense) on inventions that the company believes may have commercial potential, but the patents themselves are owned by the university.
• The company gets first rights to negotiate for licenses on patents it has identified, but is limited by a cap on the number of licenses, based on the company’s proportional support of the department as a whole. As of now, the cap limits the company to about one-third of the inventions. (Typically, sponsors get first licensing rights only to ideas that they themselves have financed.)
• To allow time for patents to be filed, the company can ask Berkeley to delay a publication or presentation beyond the 30 days’ notice, for up to 60 additional days. A delay of up to 90 days is similar to what Berkeley typically allows in corporate-sponsored agreements.
• The company’s only say over what gets published or presented is to restrict publishing of data that are proprietary, as is typical. The company can have its name omitted as a sponsor of research in publications or at presentations.

http://chronicle.com Section: Money & Management Page: A24