The Cornell Univ website has a section, prominently linked from their front page <http://www.cornell.edu>, called Corporate Connections <http://corporate.cornell.edu/>....
I've never seen anything this blatant at any other univ website - has anyone else seen this stuff?
Doug
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Below is a piece of an dept e-mail (from this week) from where I used to work--when it was still publicly funded eating federal grants and imagining it was starving to death (it wasn't). If you read between the lines you will see how these sorts of corporate-academic partnerships work. It is not as bullish as the Cornell site above, but its insidiousness should get the point across.
Novartis is a division of Sandoz (Swiss or German drug company I think) and currently has a contract with the UCB Dept of Plant and Microbial Biology with license and patent rights on research in 'trade' for various grants and shared resources.
See <http://www.novartis.com/home/> for the nice graphic slime. For the scary interlocking stuff follow the links to see the vision at <http://www.info.novartis.com/healthcare/index.html>.
The note below mentions Arabidopsis (a tiny common weed). Its significance is that it has a very long history of research and because of that knowledge base plus its hardiness, ease and speed of growth, it forms a model plant system to work out various physiological, genetic and experimental regimes. Corn is another of these model genetic systems. So, it's just wonderful to hear that Novartis will control most of the newer information and genetic work on Arabidopsis. To see how promising this can be check the investor page and the kind of company our little weed keeps: <http://www.info.novartis.com/investors/index_reports.html>
Read'm and puke. Note the great opportunity for volunteer work in the spirit of exciting scientific comradery.
When federal and state education and research money is restricted, cut, and made generally unreliable, public institutions like UCB don't lay around and die of starvation. Through the mechanism of the Regents (corporate minded board of governors) they mobilize themselves and start selling the institution off to the private sector. In California most of this more direct privatization move was the consequence of extreme budget cuts from the late eighties and early nineties (thanks to former gov Wilson). Whole departments disappeared, tentured faculty were given golden parachutes to early retirement and what was left was re-organized around a general plan to make these sorts of academic-corporate partnerships easier to accomplish.
On the medicine front the general clamp-down on federal healthcare money has effectively ruined public teaching hospitals which relied on medicare and medicaid for the bulk of their patient loads (along with direct federal subsidies). Follow the Stanford-UCSF merger and its collapse for the medical wing equivalent to the bio-science story.
Chuck Grimes
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Dear Colleagues,
We are organizing our department's participation in collecting 100,000 Arabidopsis T-DNA lines generated at Novartis . The project is now termed GARLIC (Gilroy Arabidopsis Reverse Library Insertion Collection). We will help transfer seedlings, collect tissue and seed from all lines. Genomic DNA flanking each T-DNA insert will be isolated, sequenced and arrayed on two high density filters by Novaris.. All lines and coressponding information will be made available as a resource to all Department laboratories participating in the Collaborative Research Agreement.
This is a great opportunity for all of us to gain access to a large number of new T-DNA mutants. The Novartis group in Gilroy will oversee the propagation and collection of the lines. The project has been carefully planned and we will provide the additional hands needed to collect the tissue and harvest seed. Arrangements for comfortable accommodation in Gilroy have been made and it will not be necessary to travel every day. The first 50,000 lines will be started in September. We need volunteers for the project on the following scheduled dates: