Dean selection

East Bay Express - November 19, 1998

Biotech Giant Signs Controversial Deal With UC’s College of Natural Resources

"The privatization of education is going to make the dismantling of affirmative action look like little kiddie stuff."

By Dashka Slater

Last Tuesday, the faculty of UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources (CNR) gathered as one at the Berkeley Art Museum to meet John Sorensen, the president of Novartis Seeds. The faculty was on the brink of agreeing to an alliance with the Novartis Agribusiness Discovery Institute, in which the university would receive $25 million for research into plant and microbial genetics in exchange for giving first crack at the potentially lucrative results to the Swiss biotechnology giant. After he was introduced by Gordon Rausser, dean of the CNR, Sorensen gave a brief speech in which he said how much he was looking forward to this productive new relationship. Then the sixty or so dinner guests were invited to pose any questions they might have about the arrangement.

Carl Anthony, the founder of Earth Island Institute and a member of the CNR’s advisory committee, jumped to his feet. He is not necessarily against the alliance, he said, but he did have some questions about the ethical and political implications of so close a relationship with a private company. How was this arrangement going to affect the university’s intellectual responsibility for promoting research that serves the wider community? What were the implications for hunger in a world in which access to food is limited by corporate control of agriculture? "We need to have a full public discussion of this deal," Anthony said after the meeting.

But it looks as though those questions will have to be answered another day. On Monday, UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl is scheduled to sign the agreement between Novartis and the College of Natural Resources, despite repeated requests from students and faculty for an opportunity to discuss the deal, the details of which had been kept strictly under wraps. "The chancellor doesn’t want us to discuss the agreement until it’s been signed," explained project spokesman Jerry Lubenow last Friday. "I think when it’s announced people will agree that every precaution to protect academic freedom has been taken."

Those assurances have done little to comfort the deal’s critics, who worry that one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies is managing to buy itself a controlling interest in a public university, with potentially devastating impacts on both the university and the environment. "According to its Web page, the College of Natural Resources is committed to the environment, sustainability, and food safety," says Peter Rosset, executive director of the Oakland-based Food First/The Institute for Food and Development Policy. "By signing an exclusive contract with an agricultural-biotechnology company, that raises real concerns about the impact of that technology on the environment, on sustainability, and on food safety. It seems to be a movement in the opposite direction from the stated goals and mandate of the college."

Taking its name from a Latin phrase meaning "new arts," Novartis was formed in 1996 through a merger of two Swiss companies, Ciba and Sandoz, in what was the largest corporate merger in world history. While its various divisions also develop pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and veterinary products, it is best known in Europe for creating genetically modified plants, particularly a strain of corn that produces its own pesticide.

The corn was planted for the first time this year in Spain, France, and Germany, touching off protests by environmentalists and farmers worried that the corn, which also contains genes that provide resistance to the antibiotic Ampicillin and tolerance to the herbicide glufosinate, would cross-pollinate with unaltered corn. (The antibiotic resistance was put in to simplify seed production.) In September, Greenpeace activists dumped 4.5 tons of the Novartis corn in front of Novartis’ Swiss headquarters, along with a banner reading, "Novartis maize—back to sender!" One month later, it appeared that the group’s fears were confirmed. Novartis corn planted in southern Germany had cross-pollinated with conventional corn being grown in an adjacent field. German farmers are now demanding compensation for any contamination. French farmers have protested genetically-engineered corn by breaking into the warehouse where it was stored and urinating all over the seeds.

What worries Europeans is the possibility that the new corn may foster a new breed of pests resistant to the tools we now have to control them, whether those pests are crop-eating insects or disease-producing bacteria. Norway, Austria, and Luxembourg are among the European governments that have banned the import of crops that include the antibiotic-resistant gene. Meanwhile, farmers, particularly organic farmers, worry that insects will become resistant to Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), a bacterial protein that Novartis engineered into the DNA of its Bt Corn. For decades, organic farmers have been using small doses of Bt, a naturally occurring pesticide that breaks down quickly in sunlight. But there’s a world of difference between small, focused applications of Bt and a new breed of plants whose stems, leaves, and roots all contain Bt. A recent Swiss study suggests that beneficial insects who would not be harmed by the spray application can be killed by eating the Bt corn. And while Bt is generally considered benign, no studies have looked at how humans and animals might be affected by eating foods whose cell structure contains it.

Questions about the effects of genetically engineered crops on pesticide resistance or human health might well be answered in an academic setting, perhaps by the plant and microbial biology professors in the College of Natural Resources. But how willing will researchers be to explore those issues when they are receiving grant money from Novartis? "In order for the government to regulate biologically engineered organisms, there has to be a body of disinterested scientific research," Rosset observes. "Is the EPA going to find the College of Natural Resources researching the potential harmful effects of biotechnology on the environment? I don’t think so."

Under the terms of the deal, Novartis will provide the Plant and Microbial Biology Department with $5 million in unrestricted research money for each of the next five years. One-third of the money will go to the university to be spent in whatever way campus administrators think is best. A joint committee of three university faculty and two Novartis representatives will oversee the remaining two-thirds. Novartis may also provide $25 million to refurbish a campus building for use as laboratory space for three Novartis researchers who would also become members of the faculty. That part of the deal, which must be approved by the regents, has yet to be finalized.

In exchange for this largesse, Novartis would be first in line when negotiating for the commercial rights to the plant biologists’ research, doubtlessly the company’s primary motivation for the deal. But biotechnology experts say that there is a second reason that biotech firms are allying themselves with universities: liability. Field tests of genetically engineered organisms involve substantial risks, and many biotech firms have found themselves unable to get insurance. "Insurance is the Achilles heel of the biotech industry," says Andrew Kimbrell of the Center for Technology Assessment in Washington, DC. There have already been hundreds of lawsuits over the release of transgenetic organisms, Kimbrell says, and he expects there will be more as biotech companies rush to market their latest discoveries.

"Agricultural biological research almost always involves field trials," he explains. "Field trials are rife with potential liability because of the unpredictability of how these genes are going to jump. There can be unintended consequences that can be devastating. Once you release a biological pollutant into the environment, it’s not like a chemical. You can’t recall it, it’s out there. It mutates, it reproduces, it’s in the environment. Sooner or later we’re going to have our biotech Three Mile Island."

University affiliation, Kimbrell theorizes, offers biotech companies the legal protection they’ve been looking for. "[The UC systems offers] significant immunity from liability," he explains. "So if there are problems with the release of genetic materials, the private company can use the university to shield them from any kind of tort responsibility. So the patents will go to the private company, and the liability will go to the university."

Novartis declined to comment on this or any other aspect of the alignment, but the university’s Jerry Lubenow doesn’t view liability issues as a concern. "There have been 4,000 field tests out there on genetically altered plants, and nothing unexpected has happened," he says.

To Lubenow, the Novartis deal is an unmitigated positive for the university and its researchers. Under the terms of the alliance, UC Berkeley’s plant biologists will have access to the company’s genetic sequencing databases, a valuable resource that no public institution could afford on its own. And as College of Natural Resources Dean Gordon Rausser explained in a recent article, public funding for agricultural research has declined sharply in recent years. The university now receives only one-third of its budget from the state, and it has turned to the private sector to make up the difference. Rausser actively recruited bids from Novartis and several of its competitors, and he is a firm believer in the concept of public-private collaboration. (His own Law and Economics Consulting Group, valued at $160 million, is staffed by university professors who offer consulting services to such companies as Chevron, Intel, Pacific Bell, and PG&E.)

Rausser lauds the Novartis deal as a fundamentally new kind of arrangement that will serves as a model for other universities, but many in the College of Natural Resources find that a disturbing notion. "There’s a whole industry here, the privatization of education," says one professor. "The privatization of education is going to make the dismantling of affirmative action look like little kiddie stuff." The students and faculty who have been protesting the Novartis deal worry that the new era of corporate alliances will spell the end of research that doesn’t have commercial applications, which in turn will spell the end of the university’s public mission. "What happens to research in the social sciences?" asks graduate student Arielle Levine. "Will there be funding for research that can’t be patented?"

"I see the alliance with Novartis undermining the number one mission of the college, which is to do agricultural research and transfer that knowledge to the people," agrees graduate student Jesse Reynolds. "Now that knowledge may be, ‘Hey, Novartis sucks.’ Or, ‘Genetic engineering is going to ruin agriculture.’ That’s why I got into such a tizzy about this deal. What scares me is what isn’t in the contract—it’s the de facto power that comes from $50 million."

Some of that de facto power has already made itself felt. Many faculty in the college have privately expressed both concern and fury about the deal, but graduate students say that they have had little luck persuading those same faculty members to sign a petition opposing it. "The faculty already are in an awkward position," Reynolds observes. "To protest too strongly against what your boss wants to do is universally considered not conducive to your career."

As a result, students have spearheaded opposition to the deal. The students, 300 of whom signed a petition that was given to the regents two weeks ago, claim they have been effectively shut out of the discussions, and they question Rausser’s assertion that there have been "several collegewide forums on the proposed alliance." "There’s a general feeling that this is happening whether you like it or not," says graduate student Geoff Mann. Lubenow, however, doesn’t see what all the fuss is about. "Everybody’s acting as if this is some new thing," he says. "There have always been public-private alliances. Silicon Valley was built on public-private alliances, biotechnology was built on public-private alliances. The function of the university is to funnel research into the private sector, not keep it locked up in a lab."