I have a book coming out in April that devotes considerable attention to this. I did not choose the title -- Steal this idea: the corporate confiscation of creativity. Michael Perelman
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Hope you go into the Novartis deal at UCB. But as I later figured out, this was just the tip of the iceberg. UCSF is a gold mine for this privatizing of science shit. And SFSU is another, except their focus is in education and social science, and how to develop ideas for primary/secondary education on Fed money, then get themselves entwined with the textbook publishers and education materials corporations, ie. mass media. The synergistic question here is how to meld this whole educational system into something like the computer/corp/media as classroom. NSF guidelines in science education make it almost mandatory that r and d projects have a plan for distribution and dissemination---distribution and dissemination is just nsf-tech-speak for neoliberal privatization schemes.
Besides the fact that all these developments are pig capital putrefaction incarnate, the real problem is, as they progress into interlocking systems, it becomes increasingly difficult to extract out a basic good, like actual scientific research, actual innovation in education, social welfare, actually beneficial drugs and medical procedures, etc. So critiques and reform increasingly face the problem of tossing out the baby with the bath water.
>From Les Schaffer (hey Les, welcome back): ``there was an interesting
exchange in Science magazine a couple week ago, around an earlier
correspondence entitled "Enclosing the Research Commons", by Donald
Kennedy...''
Things are much worse than just an enclosure, because it is the interpenetration of all these systems together that is the problem. And the model I would argue was the melding of physical science with the military-industrial complex, to the point where there was no such thing as advanced physical science that wasn't also a potential weapon---say early 1950s. The worst and in my opinion most likely direction of current bio-science is to make it solely applicable to capitalizing and privatizing the bio-sphere as a living system of corporate profit automata---to the mantra, if it breaths and breeds, it makes money.
Never mind. It's good that establishment science has finally noticed what was becoming obvious ten years ago.
Chuck Grimes,
Anti-everything. Demand paradise now!