Biotech: The Countercultural Origins of an Industry

2: Patronage and Policy

Chapter 2 Patronage and Policy Free scientists, following thefree play oftheir imaginations, their curiosities, their hunches, their special prejudices, their undefended likes and dislikes. . . . One can no more produce fundamental and truly original work fly means ofsome grand-over-all planning schemefor science than one can produce great sonnets fly hiring poets fly the hour. -Warren Weaver It is the fundamental tenet of our "religion" ... that research must befree and researchers must befree. -Robert Felix Whether celebrated as saviors or scorned as meddlers, patrons of science play a major role in shaping research and influencing its pace and direction. Yet too much can be made of scientific patronage as a cause of discovery. Scientists do not always conduct their experiments in concert with the intent of their sponsor, and sometimes a single scientific discovery can destabilize entire fields. Patrons may provide much needed stability for an uncertain field, but their money nonetheless strengthens the entire community-laboratories, research equipment, staff, and experimentalists too.1 In the immediate aftermath of World War II, sponsors and scientists clashed over whose interests should hold more weight, establishing in effect a contest over intellectual claims and a struggle for disciplinary authority. Amid steadily rising commitments to scientific research in the postwar era, sponsors and scientists moved toward a full-scale collision. Nowhere was this collision more evident than in the biological sciences. Before World War II, the Rockefeller Foundation-the most powerful private sponsor of scientific research-cautiously guided a steady and methodical experimental field. Then, beginning in the late 1940s, the federal government implemented policy that directed unprecedented levels of money to support laboratory research, transforming such agen- Patronage and Policy 9 cies as the National Institutes of Health from a once-insignificant government agency into a bureaucratic behemoth. In an instant, the state eclipsed the power of private sponsors. Paradoxically, however, the powerful arrival of federal science policy launched the biological sciences on a path of increasing authority. This metamorphosis was clearly marked by the state's desire for institutional stability. Policymakers created an antiseptic infrastructure that gave scientists the authority to manage funding channels and staff peer-review boards. In effect, the federal policy that supported research in the biological sciences created a double transformation: the ascendancy of state-sponsored patronage and the capture ofauthority by biological scientists .2 Private Patronage From all sides and at all times, unrelenting pressure plays upon academic scientists to locate sponsors willing to provide financial support for research. Private industry, an omnipresent source of potential patronage throughout the twentieth century, has always sought early access to experimental results, exclusive contact with graduates, or the right to establish dual licensing agreements on patentable discoveries. But some academic scientists believe that an apparently well-intentioned offer of corporate patronage conceals highly problematic trade-offs. To accept private money means entering a world from which an experimentalist may not return; to open that door means living forever with the messy, intractable problem of mission-oriented research. Investigators who choose to eschew corporate money may slog through years of perpetual impoverishment, but it is a condition much preferred to its antithesis-the loss of experimental autonomy or, worse, objectivity. The opinion that no condition, not even desperate financial need, can justify taking corporate money, would become in later decades one of the most conspicuous reversals of the field. When the twentieth century opened, before there was aggressive sponsorship of the biological sciences, when industrial support still seemed antithetical to "objectivity," and in the absence of any formidable governmental mechanism in which to distribute patronage, most investigators survived on internal university support. American colleges had always been cloaked with a public purpose, with a responsibility to the past, present, and future. The creation of tax-supported universities through the Morrill Land Grant Acts of the nineteenth century, and expressions of Christian generosity that guided individual benefactors during the Progressive Era, advanced this charitable assumption further: the college was expected to give more than it received. But this was a 10 Chapter 2 less than predictable source of revenue for the biological sciences, a field that had shown more promise than production, more hope than substance. As a result, the first two decades of the twentieth century witnessed not only an effort to identify a scientific direction; they were also a trying time to locate financial support where little existed, of choosing experimental topics with little hope for lasting...