scientists in which he pointed out the perils of patronage. As he observed, the federal government began by patronizing research and education and then proceeded to dictate medical school admissions policies and curriculum content. Although medical schools were delighted with the early patronage they were perturbed - - to say the least by the later developments. He warned that the same could happen if industry became the dominant patron. With regard to the overall problem at hand, the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force observed (p.4): "Ties between the scientific community and corporations, and between corporations and universities, are not, of course, new. Such ties are one But the new re reason for the continued supremacy of American science. lationships differ in magnitude and extent from past relationships, introducing the possibility of conflicts of interest. This danger has been recognized at many universities, which have been holding internal debates over the new relationships. It also has been the subject of various summit meetings of university leaders.... In addition, various new guidelines have been proposed by such interested groups as the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association of University Professors, and the American Civil Liberties Union (which was concerned that corporate-university agreements might curtail freedom of speech). "This Task Force does not think that radical changes are called for. Rather, we have formulated a number of proposals that we consider both flexible enough and resilient enough to protect the independence and freedom of the scientific and academic communities in dealing with government and of biotechnology may be a blessing in that it tests relations that have grown up, in many cases casually or ad hoc, and forces us to analyze them carefully." Key recommendations of the Task Force focus on disclosure: "To prevent abuses or conflicts of interest, the Task Force believes the faculty members should be required to disclose their relevant commercial connections to their department chairmen or other designated officials." (p.12) "To guarantee students their freedom, the Task Force believes that professors must fully disclose outside sponsorship to students, graduate and undergraduate, directly involved in research projects with those professors. Furthermore, the professors must define for their students procedures that will be used to determine who will be named inventors on patents that may result from the research." (p.13) There are other specific recommendations addressed to specific threats; for example: "This Task Force believes that the dangers implicit in a university taking an equity position in any company that is operated by or for some of its faculty are so great that such actions must be prohibited." (p.13) ... the Task Force believes strongly that it is ill-advised for a company to capture a whole field within a university or, for that matter, a department." (p.15) Now I shall address some specific questions posed by your staff about relations between academia and industry. 1. Do such relations inhibit the flow of information within the uni versity community? Yes, they may. However, as the Task Force observed (p.7): "Another string attached to some government contracts places conditions on the disclosure of discoveries. So, just as research projects supported by industry can be "classified" for proprietary reasons, projects supported by government can be classified for security reasons. such a case. "The Corson report of the National Academy of Sciences highlights just The DOD floated the idea that in the future it would have to give its approval before the findings of research it had sponsored could be published in journals. A possible consequence might be that a graduate student whose support came from the DOD would not know whether his thesis research could be published, a situation that students and universities would find intolerable." The Task Force addressed this problem in its recommendations stating its belief " that agreements that prohibit publication pose great danger." (p.14). ... Thus, it is not only industry that calls for secrecy within the uni- versity environment. call for secrecy. Many universities including Yale have policies prohibit ing research sponsorship by any agency that requires curtailment of publiBrief periods of delay (up to 45-90 days) are tolerated so that cation. sponsors may review prospective publications for, e.g., patentable inventions. Veto power, however, is generally precluded. University policies notwithstanding, there is still secrecy in the academic environment with or without "outside' sponsorship. Consider, for example, Watson's Double Helix. In the "academic marketplace" scientists often keep their ideas secret so that they may be accorded the recognition usually associated with being the first to publish a new idea or discovery. Years ago when I was involved in "bench" research I was involved in some pledges of secrecy that even excluded some members of the group in which I was working. Such behavior is not regarded as unusual. In professional schools there are commitments to confidentiality that override pedagogic values. Professors of psychiatry, for example, do not divulge to their students the highly confidential information they learn from their patients information which guides their approaches to - therapy, approaches that the students are supposed to be learning. This type of confidentiality is, I believe, outside of the scope of this Subcommittee's concerns. 2. Do collaborations between academia and industry change the nature of research. Does the availability of money change the objectives of re search? Again, I must answer yes. This matter was also addressed by the Task Force (pp. 6-7): "But if there are considerable differences in the approaches of government and industry to supporting university-based research, they are not as far apart as all that. Some federal agencies subject grant research proposals to peer review, but the funds made available by (DOD and NASA) and the Department of Agriculture, all major funders of scientific research, are not always subject to such review procedures. Furthermore, the con tract research portion of federal grants, which is usually not subject to peer review, can be as restrictive, in terms of the intellectual freedom accorded the individual scientist, as industry contracts. In such contract research grants, the research objective is specified by the government agency rather than by the university. "Other restrictions also arise. For example, the National Institu tes of Health (NIH) provides most of the money made available for biomedical research, money that cannot be obtained from any other source, which means that the priorities of the NIH, which is subject to political pressures to "cure" cancer or treat an epidemic, influence the priorities of the scientific community." I ask you to recall the "War on Cancer" from the early 1970s and the later high priority accorded to research and service in the field of mental health. Also please recall my earlier references to the overall influence of patronage on the arts, sciences, and universities. 3. Does industry disrupt research programs by suddenly withdrawing support for them? This question is closely related to the second question. Again, the answer is yes. Again, I must say that in this respect industry does not differ essentially from government or, for that matter, from other research sponsors. For various reasons, research sponsors may lose interest in certain fields of research. The reasons may be economic, political, or, at times, unclear. Industry may lose interest in developing a drug owing to reports of unanticipated and severe adverse effects or because some competitor |