The Recombinant University: Genetic Engineering and the Emergence of Stanford Biotechnology by Doogab Yi (review)

In 1980, the federal government granted a patent for recombinant DNA technology to two academic scientists, biochemist Herbert Boyer of the University of California at San Francisco and geneticist Stanley Cohen of Stanford University. This decision, along with the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed universities to control inventions arising from federal support, changed the academic culture and practices in academic fields, and altered the relationship between academic institutions and private enterprise. Among the results, according to Doogab Yi, was the privatization and commercialization of academic research.

Based on interviews and archival sources, Yi offers a close study of the biochemistry department at Stanford University and the biomedical community in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s, with an emphasis on context—cultural, scientific, institutional—in order to illuminate how the development and commercialization of recombinant DNA technology reconfigured academic institutions and the biomedical enterprise in the Bay Area and beyond.

In doing so, Yi challenges two popular narratives of the emergence of biotechnology: one that celebrates the inventive genius and entrepreneurial energy of a few academic pioneers in the biomedical field, and one that sees these same individuals as dazzled by potential wealth and fame and as selling out the values of academic science. Yi offers a more complicated narrative, focusing on the actions of individuals within a communal and institutional context.

The author begins with a discussion of the unique culture and practices of Stanford’s biochemistry department, which, under the guiding hand of its first chairman, Nobel laureate Arthur Kornberg, emphasized community and reciprocity. Laboratory space, facilities, equipment were shared; research support was pooled; the open exchange of ideas and the sharing of scientific credit within the department as well as with other biomedical researchers in the Bay Area was expected and fostered. Yi places Cohen’s and Boyer’s development of recombinant DNA technology firmly within this context, delineating the connections between their discovery and the work and practices of Stanford’s biochemists.

A second significant context is the political and financial climate for university-based research in the 1970s. Yi stipulates that the 1960s emphasis by dissenting groups on the need for “relevance” in university intellectual life affected the availability of unrestricted federal patronage by the 1970s. With support for basic scientific research dwindling, Stanford administrators and scientists began contemplating private funding sources. In 1970, the university established the Office of Technology Licensing (OTL) under the leadership of an energetic former contracts officer, Niels Reimers. The OTL encouraged faculty members to identify discoveries and inventions that might be patentable, and thus might generate licensing fees. Reimers learned of recombinant DNA technology and its commercial potential through the media. He then pressed Cohen to file a patent, overcoming Cohen’s initial objection that the recombinant DNA technique had emerged from collaborations with other scientists at Stanford.

The proprietary ownership of an invention—and in this instance, a basic research technique—collided with the traditions of sharing and openness in the Stanford biochemistry department, leading to resistance, rancor, and eventually the erosion and transformation of the research climate that Kornberg and his colleagues had created. It also led to a reframing of the relationship between private ownership and the public interest. The traditional argument that the results of research supported by federal dollars should be public, not patented and thus profited from by private individuals and institutions, was replaced by the claim that only the potential for private profit would spur individuals and industry to invent and then exploit a patent, and that doing so was vital to the public interest as it could lead to life-saving medical developments. That Yi seeks to address the larger political-cultural context is laudable. It seems likely, though, that the rise of neoliberalism and the growing political power of its advocates in the context of declining economic growth in the 1970s played a more significant role than calls for cultural...