Universities in the Age of Corporate Science: The UC Berkeley-Novartis Controversy (review)

In December 2001, a team of sociologists from Michigan State University (MSU) was hired by the Academic Senate of the University of California-Berkeley (UCB) to review the process by which UCB’s College of Natural Resources negotiated and implemented a five-year research funding relationship, starting in 1998, with the Swiss chemical giant Novartis. This extraordinary step reflected the perception among the agreement’s critics in the university and their external allies that it threatened the integrity of academic science. This book summarizes the findings of the MSU team and presents their views on the larger issues raised by the controversy.

The agreement contained a number of unusual provisions. It involved the funding of an entire department, Plant and Microbial Biology (PMB). It provided Novartis with the opportunity to assert intellectual property rights derived from PMB research that it had not funded, by virtue of its generosity to the department. The negotiations that led to the agreement were also peculiar. PMB’s research capability was “auctioned” off, with the departmental faculty’s enthusiastic support, by a dean who had done substantial consulting business with the winning “bidder.” Moreover, the deal was done on a fast track and in secret—even UCB’s Sponsored Projects Office was excluded in favor of the Office of Technology Licensing.

Throw these juicy ingredients into the political cauldron that is Berkeley, California, and the reader might reasonably expect a potboiler. These expectations of the narrative, however, are disappointed. Neither the story, nor the authors live up to them.

The scientific result of the agreement seems to have been to accelerate the pre-existing research agendas of the PMB faculty. The authors find little evidence that Novartis’s sponsorship reshaped faculty interests. The faculty welcomed the money, as one would expect, and so did their graduate students. The results for the business were equally unremarkable. No intellectual property of any importance was created, and the agreement was not renewed when it expired in 2003.

Restructuring in the agricultural biotechnology industry contributed significantly to this parting of the ways. Novartis divested itself of the ag biotech business in 2000, and Syngenta, the successor firm, lacked the slack to indulge in the kind of blue sky research pursued at Berkeley. For business historians, the episode provides another data point for understanding the complex co-evolution of the biotechnology industry and the organizations and institutions that construct and transmit its knowledge base, as explored by Louis Galambos and Jane Sewell in Networks of Innovation, among others.

While the present book’s authors did not control the events that comprise their story, they might have done a better job of presenting and making sense of them. The chronological narrative itself appears in a single chapter, while latter chapters revisit and delve more deeply into specific issues, such as the agreement’s impact on science and its intellectual property provisions. This structure is unwieldy, and this reader at least would have been better satisfied by a more conventional chronological approach that integrated analysis into a more extended narrative. This preference may represent a disciplinary bias on my part, but I also had the sense that the book, with seven listed co-authors, never left behind its origins as a committee report.

The interpretation of the UCB—Novartis controversy is equally unsatisfying. The authors go out of their way to highlight the potential negative consequences of the agreement, as originally framed by the critics who sponsored their work, and to embed this episode in a broader narrative of academia’s fall from grace. “As we see it,” they write early in the book, “the core question remains how to proceed when the university is in ruins. . . ” (34). Neither of these views is warranted by the facts presented in the case, nor by the broader historical trajectory of academic science and its relationship with society...