Among the various comments we've received about the extraordinary video footage of Prof Rine addressing his class about his stolen lap top, and all the major corporate interests that might affect, was the following:

"Rine… has declared under oath that he cannot be in conflict of interest with his profit motive, because he has converted his academic lab to align with the precise priorities of his commercial biotech company (he is said to be "worth" c. 50 million dollars). A certain crass and refreshing honesty here, it might seem, were it not for his blindness to the fact that he is paid a salary to have an interest in public research and education. For anthropologists and psychopathologists, this brief video may be valuable in capturing the style and affect - part macho grandiosity, part hysterical self-importance - of an early 21st century academic entrepreneur-scientist."
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6219688484727192143
transcript here: http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=5789

Obviously, we can't vouch for the exact amount that Prof Rine, who was at the centre of the row over the denial of tenure to Dr Ignacio Chapela, is "worth" - nor, for that matter, what he said or didn't say under oath - but, as we noted previously, Rine's bluster would seem to provide the most graphic illustration of the invasive nature of private interests within current public sector research.

This issue, amongst much else, was incisively explored in a wide ranging article published last year in The New York Review of Books. In 'The Truth About The Drug Companies', Marcia Angell, a former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, contrasted the current industrial-alignment of public research with pre-Reagan America, where it was widely accepted that:

"You could choose to do well or you could choose to do good, but most people who had any choice in the matter thought it difficult to do both. That belief was particularly strong among scientists and other intellectuals. They could choose to live a comfortable but not luxurious life in academia, hoping to do exciting cutting-edge research, or they could "sell out" to industry and do less important but more remunerative work..."

From the Reagan era onward, however, the world of the academy began to be transformed:

"Small biotech companies, many of them founded by university researchers to exploit their discoveries, proliferated rapidly. They now ring the major academic research institutions and often carry out the initial phases of drug development, hoping for lucrative deals with big drug companies that can market the new drugs. Usually both academic researchers and their institutions own equity in the biotechnology companies they are involved with. Thus, when a patent held by a university or a small biotech company is eventually licensed to a big drug company, all parties cash in on the public investment in research.

"These laws mean that drug companies no longer have to rely on their own research for new drugs, and few of the large ones do. Increasingly, they rely on academia, small biotech startup companies, and the NIH for that."

This sounds remarkably like the world conjured up by Prof Rine when intimidating the hypothetical student-thief:

"You are in possession of data from a hundred million dollar trial, sponsored by the NIH, for which I'm a consultant. This involves some of the largest companies on the planet.

"You are in possession of trade secrets from a Fortune 1000 biotech company, the largest one in the country, which I consult for...

"You are in possession of proprietary data..."

These new arrangements, according to Angell, have been "a bonanza for big pharma and the biotech industry." It has "also transformed the ethos of medical schools and teaching hospitals. These nonprofit institutions started to see themselves as "partners" of industry, and they became just as enthusiastic as any entrepreneur about the opportunities to parlay their discoveries into financial gain. Faculty researchers were encouraged to obtain patents on their work (which were assigned to their universities), and they shared in the royalties. Many medical schools and teaching hospitals set up "technology transfer" offices to help in this activity and capitalize on faculty discoveries. As the entrepreneurial spirit grew during the 1990s, medical school faculty entered into other lucrative financial arrangements with drug companies, as did their parent institutions."

An exactly similar transformation has, of course, other areas of public research, not least plant science and agriculture, with the same inevitable shifting of allegances.

"One of the results has been a growing pro-industry bias in medical research - exactly where such bias doesn't belong. Faculty members who had earlier contented themselves with what was once referred to as a "threadbare but genteel" lifestyle began to ask themselves, in the words of my grandmother, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" Medical schools and teaching hospitals, for their part, put more resources into searching for commercial opportunities."

Ironically, this hi-jacking of publicly funded research, together with monopoly rights, as Angell notes (item 2), now underpins vast corporations that pose as free market success stories!

Meanwhile, as Lawrence Sincich of the University of California points out in item 1 below, many formerly "threadbare but genteel" academics increasingly resemble "extramural vice-presidents of research in suits".
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1.THE DRUG COMPANIES AND THE UNIVERSITIES
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17649
Letter:In response to The Truth About the Drug Companies (July 15, 2004)
By Lawrence Sincich, Reply by Marcia Angell

To the Editors:

Marcia Angell's lucid and insightful article ["The Truth About the Drug Companies," NYR, July 15] addresses real problems in the pharmaceutical industry. Although she recognizes that academic biomedical research has increasingly become a partner to this industry, she unfortunately limits herself to a token hand-slapping over this relationship, bemoaning "a growing pro-industry bias in medical research - exactly where such bias doesn't belong." Yet she then moves on to suggest reforms only for the industrial partner. Why?

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