Check out Chancellor Birdog:
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/features/pressclub99.html
excerpt:
"And increasingly, concerns are raised about the proprietary nature of privately supported research and about the impact of such support on the free exchange of ideas.
This past year, Berkeley negotiated an agreement between the Novartis Agricultural Discovery Institute and the Department of Plants and Microbial Biology. In this agreement, Novartis will provide long- term monetary support for basic research and, in exchange, receive first rights to license some of the discoveries made. But the agreement is itself an experiment and will be subjected to careful scrutiny to determine what, if any, may be the unintended consequences of this new mixture of public and private interests.
The awesome frontiers opened up by genomic research, of course, raise even larger questions about the relationship of the public and the private spheres. Whether anyone can lay claim to owning, for commercial purposes, sequences of DNA codes is itself a larger philosophical and policy consideration. But since universities are at the center of the quest, we are also at the center of the question. And the boundaries between public and private interests become ever more fuzzy.
I have no doubt that universities, public and private, will in the course of the 21st century, be increasingly hybrids involved in both public and private realms. But for public universities, the sorting out of the relationship between these two realms is vital."