The Academic Environment: Openness in Academia

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00:14.25 Well, it's a pleasure to be here today to talk about openness in academia.
00:20.09 And what I am going to try and talk about are the questions of whether data and results being shared?
00:26.02 What are the impediments to sharing, and who is responsible?
00:29.13 When I joined the faculty in Berkeley 64 years ago, I had the very simplistic view
00:35.01 that academic institutions should be open to free discussion of controversial ideas.
00:42.25 And I was aware of course having grown up as a scientist during World War II,
00:48.06 that there was secrecy all over campuses during the war. There were logical inhibitions about publishing material.
00:54.29 Students were walking around in uniforms. We were not allowed to talk about our work.
00:59.05 And it was understandable, everybody in science whether they were in biology or chemistry or physics
01:04.24 accepted such views because we were fighting World War II
01:08.05 and it was very important to keep secret things secret.
01:11.21 When I moved to Berkeley, however, hostilities had ended and one would expect that the place would return to openness.
01:19.13 And in fact it took a couple of years before the protests of university faculty all over the country removed secret research from campuses.
01:27.19 So it was a pleasure to see campuses wide open again.
01:30.09 Now however, I find new trends towards secrecy again and secrecy comes from a variety of directions.
01:38.08 On the one hand the scientists themselves tend to be secret.
01:43.04 The second part is that companies come along on campuses and have different interests from university professors.
01:49.20 And there is secrecy as a result of that collaboration.
01:52.09 And then government has interceded in this. We wind up then with new impediments to openness.
02:00.20 And that is what I want to talk about today.
02:02.20 Now this is beautifully illustrated in my first slide which deals with scientists.
02:07.00 Here is a view of a distinguished Nobel laureate.
02:11.05 He says, "It's reached the point that I no longer put my original ideas in my research proposals,
02:17.02 which are read by many referees and officials. I hold back anything that another investigator might hop on and carry out."
02:25.03 Now that view espousing secrecy is contrasted with another Nobel laureate, who wrote,
02:32.27 "I am suspicious of scientists who tell me that others have pinched their ideas;
02:36.25 far from preventing people from stealing it, I have always had to ram any idea of mine down their throats.
02:43.26 Even scientists are unbelievably conservative."
02:47.02 Now it's fascinating. These two distinguished scientists were both crystallographers.
02:53.11 And crystallographers were publishing these great papers 10-15 years ago, up to the present time,
02:59.04 and the details of the structures of proteins that were coming out of their work were
03:03.28 too laborious and extensive to be covered in conventional journal articles, so therefore the United States government,
03:11.01 and the same thing happened in Great Britain, they set up protein databanks so the crystallographers
03:15.27 would then send their data to these databanks, and anybody who wanted to could get access to the data.
03:22.17 So people who wanted to make a mutant of that protein could do it. Other people who wanted to modify the structure a little bit could do that too.
03:29.22 And so it became traditional for crystallographers to publish their material in the protein databanks.
03:37.09 But some resisted it. The journals had policies that they would not publish your paper unless you deposit the coordinates in a protein databank.
03:44.16 Well, they had no enforcement procedures, and a lot, not a lot, but a significant number of distinguished crystallographers,
03:53.05 the first illustration of that was on my earlier slide, would not deposit their coordinates.
03:57.26 And therefore, inhibiting the scientific progress of people who wanted to extend the work, confirm the work, modify the work,
04:04.10 and finally what happened was that this got solved through a lot of hard work
04:09.02 by the public health service. And I should say the National Institute of Health under Harold Varmus decided
04:14.20 we will no longer fund scientific research in crystallography if you publish a detailed paper of structure without depositing the coordinates.
04:22.22 So that form of secrecy was eliminated.
04:25.22 Well the problem of depositing material, of ideas and data and results,
04:31.06 was also compounded by the fact that many scientists would not deposit materials.
04:37.04 So for example, one makes a mutant which is valuable, you are supposed to provide that mutant through the mail to anybody who requests it.
04:42.24 And here is a good illustration of what happened in this one case.
04:47.01 A prominent scientist at a non-profit research institution offered highly desirable material on the following conditions,
04:53.04 "that the recipients 1) not share the material or by-products with anyone else,
04:58.05 2) notify the providing institution 60 days in advance of publication,
05:03.27 and 3) yield the providers first rights on any improvement of the vector or products made with it."
05:10.11 You can just imagine the uproar that occurred over that. People were very unhappy about this, and this is a non-business institution.
05:18.15 It's a private, non-profit institution.
05:21.00 And look what happens when a company gets involved.
05:23.12 Here a company that says, "Company X would provide Institution Y 'general funding'
05:28.29 for research of its choice in return for an exclusive worldwide license to all Institution Y inventions
05:36.07 related to medical or manufacturing products, excluding existing research agreements with third parties."
05:42.01 Notice the word "all" because that will be important. And the company goes on to write,
05:46.23 "Company X would be allowed to review invention disclosures stemming from federally funded research
05:52.02 at Institution Y before the disclosures are filed with the government."
05:56.19 Again, pretty reprehensible behavior. This one actually wound up on the floor of Congress
06:01.22 because this company was asking for rights to all discoveries in that laboratory,
06:07.06 even though they were only funding 20% of the research in that laboratory.
06:10.25 So that meant that they couldn't get involved with NIH funded research.
06:14.07 So the uproar over this kind of behavior was enormous, and much of it has now stopped, although it still continues.
06:21.01 The coordinate problem is still with us in other fields of science.
06:24.07 So now let me go on to two cases, which I will talk about very, very briefly.
06:29.05 One involved a woman named Nancy Olivieri at Children's Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto,
06:37.29 and she was also a professor at the University of Toronto.
06:40.25 She was involved in research on thalassemia.
06:43.07 The research was funded by a big company in Canada, and she wanted to publish it.
06:48.18 And they told her she can't publish it.
06:49.25 She was determined to publish it because she found out that the drug that they were using which they thought was very promising
06:55.21 actually turned out to be deleterious and was harmful.
06:58.08 And she felt that it was her obligation to report those results to the parents of these sick children.
07:04.02 So a huge battle ensued because she did publish it.
07:07.06 She got dismissed from the affair. She got fired, and a battle ensued that lasted for a long period of time.
07:13.14 There was a beautiful comment as a result of that battle coming from John Polyani, a Nobel laureate from the University of Toronto,
07:20.00 and he wrote as part of a discussion of this problem, "Even in an age of commerce,
07:25.15 we need enclaves in our society where the views that are expressed have not been purchased."
07:31.01 A remarkable statement, perfectly obvious that you don't have companies interfering with the publication, dissemination of research results,
07:40.03 especially since the research dealt with fact that the drug could be harmful to kids.
07:45.09 She had a confidentiality agreement, which she shouldn't have signed.
07:48.08 It shouldn't have been offered to her, and the hospital shouldn't have allowed it.
07:51.20 So all three were guilty on that score.
07:53.27 In another case, involving Brown University, there was a professor there by the name of David Kern who was in charge of occupational medicine.
08:01.05 And in the course of talking to people who were coming in to see him, he noticed some people with a lung disease.
08:08.04 And he read the literature, found out that it was a company in Canada
08:11.06 just like the company that these people were working for making microfibers
08:15.18 that they were also having what he called interstitial lung disease.
08:19.03 So he immediately told the people in the union, you better stop working there because you are going to have real problems.
08:26.02 The company that was sponsoring the research, and was a major donor to Brown University,
08:30.04 didn't like that advice at all, and they told him that he can't release the information.
08:33.24 He decided to release it anyway, and he published it in one of the journals dealing with thoracic medicine.
08:39.10 And immediately he got in a lot of trouble.
08:43.01 He had too signed a confidentiality agreement, but his agreement had nothing to do with treatment of patients.
08:49.24 It had to do only with trade secrets of which he was completely unaware, because that wasn't his province.
08:54.17 In any case, he left. The American Thoracic Society wrote the following note in support of him.
09:00.16 "Barriers to the open communication of scientific information must be resisted.
09:05.20 In particular, the threat of litigation, and or elimination of financial support
09:10.25 to prevent the open communication of scientific information is abhorrent."
09:15.08 So David Kern was fired from the job as head of occupational medicine.
09:19.11 He left Brown University, and he is practicing medicine on the side.
09:23.03 The secrecy demanded of universities by companies of the type I have just described has led to a major change
09:30.11 in the administrative structure of university campuses.
09:33.21 It is much more bureaucratic. We now have material transfer agreements. We have technology transfer offices.
09:39.05 We now have member of understanding, and we have to be aware of that.
09:44.25 What used to be a simple transfer of materials of a colleague to another university of a clone, a plasmid, whatever, a strain, is no longer possible.
09:55.09 You now must go through a technology transfer offices.
09:58.16 So they have to contact... the technology transfer officer on your campus has to notify the transfer officer of another campus
10:06.21 and they negotiate. Usually by the time the negotiations are completed, the guy who asked for the material has forgotten what he asked for,
10:13.08 and the man who was going to supply it doesn't know what he is supplying.
10:15.21 So in the meantime the word intellectual property has come up.
10:19.29 These offices are there to protect intellectual property. It has changed the nature and the culture of universities.
10:26.10 And one illustration of that is indicated by this statement from the chancellor
10:30.22 of the UC San Diego campus in his state of the campus address in 2001.
10:38.03 He wrote, "as scholars, we should not seek knowledge for its own sake."
10:42.20 A pretty horrendous statement for somebody who is the head of the university.
10:47.10 The statement was so horrendous that in fact in years after the speech was originally given by Mr. Dynes,
10:54.25 it was modified on the web from its original form and its printed form.
11:00.02 And now it reads as follows, "as scholars, we should not seek knowledge merely for its own sake."
11:05.14 And the word merely was inserted. I am not sure that makes it much better, but that's what the present view of the statement is on the archives.
11:15.04 He then became the president of the University of California, I should point out,
11:18.15 statewide, from which he has been removed at a later time.
11:22.00 Why did he say this? He said this because he was bragging about the fact that at San Diego,
11:27.04 50 new companies had been started by the faculty of the campus.
11:31.23 And he was so proud of that, he wanted to go the industrial route.
11:36.04 The next sentence in this statement is, "We should seek knowledge that has real value for us."
11:41.25 So in other words, he has staked out the commercial point of view about universities.
11:47.08 We should no longer be institutions for the dissemination and production of knowledge,
11:52.20 we should be universities that, as I will indicate later, make money for us because we have to support ourselves.
11:58.27 Obviously we are short on money right now from government sources so there is understandable pressure in that direction.
12:04.07 But a lot of people don't like this point of view.
12:06.14 This is illustrated by Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard University, who wrote
12:11.04 "Commercialization threatens to change the character of the university in ways that limit its freedom,
12:17.15 sap its effectiveness and lower its standing in society.
12:21.14 A pretty profound statement indicating what he thinks the university ought to be.
12:26.08 He is not alone. Here is a statement from Jennifer Washburn who wrote a wonderful book called "University Inc".
12:32.03 "The strength of academia lies not in market-driven commercial product development, but in its capacity to appreciate
12:39.27 the intrinsic value of intellectual discovery, human creativity, knowledge, and ideas.
12:46.04 Again a kind of statement that I happen to fall in love with rather than a statement that as scholars we should not produce knowledge for its own sake.
12:53.27 I would hate to be in the history department at San Diego when this man made this statement.
12:59.11 So finally to indicate my point about intellectual property and the directions we have gone in,
13:07.04 I will illustrate this with a statement from the Royal Society in London:
13:10.13 "The pressure to patent, to produce exploitable results, and to protect intellectual property
13:16.12 have significant potential to impede scientific endeavor and, by extension, innovation."
13:21.29 This is particularly satisfying to me because about eight years ago I was asked to write a reflection on my career
13:28.29 for the hundredth birthday of the Journal of Biological Chemistry,
13:31.28 and I chose not to write about my beautiful research. I chose to write about how academia has changed.
13:39.05 And the title of my article was "From publish or perish to patent and prosper" and that is essentially where we are today.
13:46.04 In closing I would like to return once more to the so-called marriage between universities and industry.
13:53.03 And this is illustrated by a horrible contract that came out as a result of a New York Times investigative reporter
14:01.01 who used the Freedom of Information Act to uncover what was considered to be a secret deal.
14:06.17 And this is the arrangement. The University of Virginia Commonwealth university secret contract to do research for Philip Morris.
14:15.29 And the contract reads as follows: "The contract bars professors from publishing the results of their studies,
14:22.19 or even talking about them without Philip Morris's permission. If a third party, including news organizations asks about the agreement,
14:32.12 university officials have to decline to comment and inform the company.
14:37.02 Nearly all patent and other intellectual property rights go to the company,
14:42.04 not the university or its professors." A pretty horrible contract.
14:47.06 And notice the word intellectual property comes up again.
14:49.20 In closing this discussion, I call it openness or money.
14:54.10 "There is restrictive language in here" said Francis Macrina, Virginia Commonwealth University's vice-president for research,
15:00.17 who acknowledged that many of the provisions violated the university's guidelines for industry-sponsored research.
15:09.11 "In the end," he goes on, "it was language we thought we could agree to. It's a balancing act."
15:15.09 You will be the judge as to whether this was a legitimate balancing act.
15:19.28 And in closing I want to get back to the word IP, which used to be called intellectual property
15:26.19 and as a result of transitions over the years is mutated from intellectual property to intellectual profiteering
15:34.06 and even as one of my friends pointed out, to intellectual piracy.
15:39.04 In closing I return to H. L. Mencken who said, "If it is not about money, it's about money." Thank you very much.

This Talk

Speaker: Howard Schachman

Audience:

Educators of H. School / Intro Undergrad
Student
Educators of Adv. Undergrad / Grad
Researcher
Educators

Recorded: May 2012

Talk Overview

Schachman asserts that sharing data and material is critical to the advancement of basic research. He argues that allowing commercial interests to restrict academic freedom would seriously undermine the character of the academic environment.

Speaker Bio

Howard Schachman

Dr. Schachman joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley in 1948 and is still teaching there as Professor of the Graduate School in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. He has a long history of involvement in public policy related to science. The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology honored him… Continue Reading