Impure Cultures: University Biology and the World of Commerce (review)

This short but engaging book aims to fill a gap between macrolevel studies of academic relations with industry, as typified by David Noble's America by Design, and microlevel studies of scientific practice, perhaps best exemplified by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's Laboratory Life. Like Noble, Kleinman asks questions about large-scale phenomena and trends. Like Latour and Woolgar, Kleinman takes readers into a particular laboratory and studies it as a participant-observer. His site was the laboratory of Jo Handelsman at the University of Wisconsin, where Kleinman sojourned for some months during the mid-1990s. The lab's focus was on pest control; Kleinman's was on the ways, formal and informal, that the laboratory's work intersected the world of commerce.

As any veteran of faculty dining rooms can testify, interest in business patronage has increased dramatically over the past thirty years, as has concern about the baleful effects that corporate money might have on the mores and practices of the academy. Headlines about patent struggles, conflicts of interest, academic secrecy, and outright fraud are, to say the least, unsettling to those who think of the university as dedicated to the open sharing of ideas and the disinterested pursuit of truth. Kleinman, to his credit, bypasses both the horror stories and the myths of the ivory tower. Universities, he rightly points out, have long had dense connections with commerce, and while the intensity of those relationships may have changed in recent decades, it is far from clear if the basic patterns are different today in most fields and universities from what they were a generation ago.

Kleinman illustrates these points both through a brief exposition of the history of the science of pest management and through his account of the time he spent in the Handelsman lab at Madison. The reporting on the Handelsman lab is especially interesting since Kleinman conveys to readers something all too rare in scholarly literature—a sense of his own surprise. Kleinman appears to have entered the laboratory with the expectation of finding abundant evidence of direct corporate influence. Research on pest control, of course, has commercial potential; the laboratory drew on grants from the private sector to support its research; and it cooperated with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation in handling intellectual property. Kleinman, however, found little sign of heavy-handed corporate pressure or academic deference to corporate aims. Contacts with patrons were sporadic and information flowed freely both within the laboratory and between it and the larger world. "One could miss a few days in the lab over six months and easily miss the infrequent references to explicit connections between the Handelsman lab and the world of commerce" (p. 16).

Continuity with the past, then, is one of Kleinman's themes, and his study is a reassuring corrective to those who imagine that our universities are infected with a terminal case of entrepreneurial fever. But even as he reassures, he also points out that a commercial culture is part of the air breathed in Madison no less than in the Silicon Valley. This culture, he argues, shapes academic research in indirect ways and has done so going back to the beginnings of graduate education in America. So, for example, work on biological methods of pest control takes place within a matrix of expectations shaped by decades of aggressive investment by industry in chemical pesticides. Under these circumstances, it is not enough that a biological method work; it must also show significant advantages against chemicals that have long histories of testing, production, distribution, and use. Even the day-to-day work in Handelsman's lab reflected this heritage—in its routine use of chemical pesticides as controls in testing biological agents, for instance, and in the framing of research results in published reports.

Kleinman argues that the world of commerce shapes the academic laboratory in other indirect ways as well, as, for instance, through the standardized reagents, test kits...