Letter opposing the alliance

The College of Natural Resources at the University of California, Berkeley, and Novartis, the Swiss chemical and biotechnology giant, are in the final stages of creating what has been termed a "strategic alliance." We, the undersigned, have profound reservations about the academic impacts of such an alliance, about the support of biotechnology that such an alliance implies, and about the appropriateness of such an alliance between a private corporation and a public university.

We urge that you

OPPOSE THE ALLIANCE

between the College of Natural Resources

and Novartis Corporation

 

We further request that a review be conducted on the long-term academic, fiscal, and ethical implications of all university-industry alliances of this magnitude. We believe that the University of California, as a world leader in research and education, has the responsibility to establish comprehensive and conservative standards for including for-profit corporations in the research and teaching components of a public university.

Our concerns with the Novartis agreement fall into three broad categories, each of which is explained more thoroughly in the attached Statement of Concerns.

    1. The alliance itself will have significant and, we believe, negative impacts on teaching and research in the College of Natural Resources.
    2. By creating an alliance with Novartis, the College of Natural Resources implicitly supports the basic goals of Novartis. These include highly controversial directions such as biotechnology and genetic engineering.
    3. This is an alliance between a public land-grant institution, which is charged with teaching the state’s students and conducting public-good research, with a private company, which has as its main goal the creation of profit. We believe that creating such an alliance is in direct conflict with our mission as a public university and that establishing such a precedent, on such a large scale, is dangerous.

 

 

STATEMENT OF CONCERNS

 

ISSUE ONE: Negative Impacts of the Alliance on the College of Natural Resources

Of significant concern is the broad scope of the alliance. Although only researchers in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology have been invited to participate in the alliance, the alliance itself is between Novartis and the entire College of Natural Resources. This inclusion of the other three departments in the College is unnecessary and puts their reputations for conducting impartial research at risk. As Rachel Carson said in her seminal book, Silent Spring, when a scientific society acknowledges a trade organization as a sustaining associate, whose voice do we hear when that society speaks — that of science or of industry?

Why is this agreement not made between Novartis and specific labs? Why is the funding not granted to particular researchers? There is already a mechanism in place for such support: 33% of the grant money goes to overhead, a specific project is funded, and publications resulting from such funding include acknowledgement of the source of financial support. Nothing precludes individual faculty from sharing their research results with Novartis or receiving access to Novartis’s proprietary information. These agreements have taken place across the University for decades and have stood the test of time.

We believe such a broad-based agreement as the strategic alliance is inappropriate and extremely risky.

Academic freedom is critical for the College to survive and thrive in the University. We believe there are too few safeguards in this alliance with Novartis to protect academic freedom from the influence of the gigantic, multinational corporation that is investing such a large sum of money.

Although the Oversight Committee is a proposed mechanism for safeguarding academic freedom. However, because Novartis scientists will make up a large proportion of the committee, this committee does not provide sufficient objective oversight.

The presence of Novartis’s research scientists on the faculty alters the dynamics of faculty meetings and votes. With a Dean wholly in support of this alliance, the University runs the risk that faculty in opposition to the alliance may not speak out for fear of being denied promotions, funding, research space, or other support.

Teaching may also be significantly impacted. We fear that courses which address sustainable development, bioethics, and process-based agriculture may receive less support than courses on genetic engineering, biotechnology, and product-based agriculture. This trend in turn will influence the future research goals of the graduates of the program, and will have tremendous — and we believe negative — impacts on the future of agricultural research and development. Bioethics courses in the College are already rare, and any action that may reduce availability of these courses even further should be strongly opposed.

The alliance of Novartis with the College may influence which faculty researchers are hired. The money supplied by Novartis, and the presence of Novartis scientists on the faculty, could reduce the range of research interests considered when hiring faculty, placing a stronger emphasis on those faculty investigating biotechnology or other interests compatible with this alliance. The College could compromise its ability to attract or maintain faculty who are uncomfortable with such a strong corporate alliance. This would deny the students and fellow members of the faculty the opportunity to work with some of the best and brightest researchers in natural resources and reduce Berkeley’s reputation as the world’s best research institution.

There may also be significant fiscal impacts. Certain faculty in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology may hesitate to seek funding from any of Novartis’s competitors, or the College may find itself in the awkward position of instructing faculty to avoid making agreements with competitors. Organizations supporting alternative agricultural methods are unlikely to fund members of the department. Federal and state funding may decrease as the government perceives that the College has recently received such a large infusion of funds. For those faculty members not receiving research money from the Novartis alliance, this could have serious, negative impacts on their ability to fund their research.

There are also larger, less well defined, but potentially critical legal and liability issues. What liabilities will the university incur? What happens if construction on the new facility begins, but Novartis backs out of the deal? Is the university responsible for completing construction? What is the university’s role if Novartis is sued for something related to research conducted by Berkeley faculty? It seems as if this agreement is opening a legal hornets’ nest that cannot benefit our twin missions of teaching and research.

In summary, we believe that the direct impacts of the Novartis Strategic Alliance on the College of Natural Resources will be largely negative, and that these impacts will interfere with the College’s mission of providing the state with a world-class teaching and research institution.

 

ISSUE TWO: Implicit Support of Novartis’s Corporate Goals

Modern agriculture relies heavily on the application of chemicals to its fields and crops — fungicides, herbicides, insecticides, rodenticides, fertilizers, and other chemicals. Each of these enters the air and the water in phenomenal quantities, and many have been implicated with various human diseases and disorders including cancer, nerve damage, birth defects, blindness, and respiratory ailments. Although the U.S. government has numerous agencies and legislation to protect the American people, the farm workers, and the environment, there is a preponderance of evidence that these are insufficient. The increasing concentrations of these chemicals in the water supply, the air, and the tissues of people working or living near agricultural areas are testimony to the inadequacy of the controls. This product-based farming is typical of the large corporate farms that produce much of the food in the United States.

There are many alternatives to such heavy applications of chemicals, many of which are included in the generic name of organic farming or process-based farming. These alternatives include planting more than one crop in a single field to reduce the spread of disease between plants; using organisms such as bacteria and insects to biologically control crop pests; removing weed species manually; and rotating crops within a field to fertilize the soil naturally.

Product-based farming has many advocates, and is touted as necessary for the rapid, cost-efficient production of the enormous quantities of food necessary to feed the United States and the world. It has its share of detractors too, who point to the large food surpluses and government subsidies paid to farmers to not grow crops. There is also little argument that the negative impacts of product-based farming are real: increased levels of chemicals in the environment, increased incidence of human diseases and disorders, decreased ability of the environment to support natural plant and animal life, loss of a significant amount of crop land due to leeching of the nutrients from the soil, development of insecticide-resistance in many crop pests leading to epidemics, and a fundamental shift in the economics of farming resulting in the loss of many small farms to large corporate aggregations.

Many of us in the College of Natural Resources believe that the main focus of a public land-grant institution’s research should be on developing more and better process-oriented solutions to the agricultural problems that have been created by product-based farming. Creating an alliance with Novartis, one of the world’s largest developers and sellers of agricultural products and chemicals, implicitly supports product-based agriculture. Even if the research conducted by the faculty in the College who are supported by Novartis is not based on product-based agriculture, the public perception of the alliance will be that we as an institution support their overriding mission of providing products to agriculture. This is not an endorsement we should be making.

Novartis is a world leader in producing genetically engineered organisms. Some genetically engineered crops produce pesticides in their cells, which are then consumed with the food. These foods are not labeled as containing pesticides, and the health and environmental effects are not monitored by the Environmental Protection Agency. Some genetic crops are self-sterilizing, which increases the dependence of individual farmers on the companies who own the genetic information contained within the crops. Other crops are genetically engineered to be resistant to herbicides that are manufactured and sold by the same companies that sell the genetically engineered crop.

The biological, economical and ethical implications of genetic engineering are highly controversial and poorly understood. There are many arguments against advancing our technical understanding as long as our ethical understanding lags so far behind.

Again, we resist the implication made by this alliance with Novartis that the College of Natural Resources supports genetic engineering.

 

ISSUE THREE: Violation of the Mission of a Land-grant Institution

As a land-grant and public university, we are charged with teaching and researching for the public good. An alliance of this magnitude with a for-profit private corporation jeopardizes our ability to meet that charge.

Novartis is a for-profit company and as such has a vested interested in increasing its profits through this alliance. Although the College may incur some benefits from the alliance, such as greater access to proprietary genetic data and collaborations with scientists from Novartis’s labs that would otherwise not occur, it should not be denied that Novartis is essentially hiring the College of Natural Resources to extend the company’s research capacity. This is a violation of our mission. Under this alliance, we are working to increase the profit of a private corporation, which is not a public-good outcome.

Faculty members become hired researchers, and their graduate students become hired assistants. The College becomes an extension of Novartis, and the University’s credibility is diminished. We fail the public. We fail at our mission. For this reason alone, the College, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California should reject this alliance.

We urgently request that the Strategic Alliance between the College of Natural Resources at the University of California, Berkeley, and Novartis Corporation be opposed.

We believe that this alliance is bad for the College, bad for the University, and bad for the Public to whom we are obliged for our very existence.