Forty years ago one of the slogans making the rounds at the University of Toronto where I was an undergraduate was “Who does the university serve?” In 2006, the question is still being asked in the context of whether the profit motive fits with the university’s mission. Translating ideas into practical benefits for society is not something to be spurned but what happens when those ideas are sold to the highest bidder? Keith Banting’s review of Public Science, Private Interests: Culture and Commerce in Canada’s Networks of Centres of Excellence acknowledges that the neo-liberal agenda was part of the rationale for the establishment of the Centres of Excellence but divorces that from the doctrine that “technological innovation, making knowledge accumulation and transmission” among the “central concerns of modern industrial policy.”
If they are central concerns how did they get that way? Who pushes, and benefits most, from the ideas that, according to Banting, are the main focus of modern society? Let me demonstrate with the area that I know best—pharmaceutical policy. The pharmaceutical industry is very successful at bringing new drugs to market but it relies heavily on publicly funded basic research to identify promising new leads. In fact, after taking into account tax credits for doing research, we find that only about one to two cents out of each sales dollar go to basic research. It’s in the best interests of the drug companies to make sure that they have close ties with academia, and the industry has worked hard to ensure that these relationships are strengthened.
In the United States the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 was a key element in translating knowledge into commercialized products by allowing academic scientists to retain patent rights on inventions that they developed from federal funding. The pharmaceutical industry helped lobby for this act and has profited enormously from it. Taxol (paclitaxel), which by 2001 had become the bestselling cancer drug in history, was developed almost entirely by the publicly funded National Institutes of Health and then licensed exclusively to the pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb.
But the industry has done more than just be the recipient of new drugs. It has helped shape the academic biomedical agenda. There are justifiable fears that the money from industry to university scientists is biasing the types of questions that are asked in favour of those that will ultimately lead to patentable products. Faculty members who are funded by industry are more likely to refuse to share research results than those who are not recipients of industry largesse.
Research results unfavourable to industry may be suppressed—witness what happened to Dr. Nancy Olivieri, and her story is far from an isolated event. Finally, even when results are published, if the research has been sponsored by industry it is consistently more likely to be favourable to the product being studied than if funding came from any other source. The end result is that our knowledge of how well drugs work may be seriously distorted because of the source of money to study them. Technological innovation, knowledge accumulation and transmission have been key to keeping the pharmaceutical industry at or near the top of the profit heap; at the same time only about 10 percent of new drugs are therapeutic advances of any significance. We can’t understand the forces behind industry-academic intertwining without knowing who benefits the most from the relationship.
Joel Lexchin
Toronto, Ontario
