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I am on page 172 of Universities in the Age of Corporate Science, The UC Berkeley - Novartis Controversy. Alan Rudy is the lead author. The study has its flaws, but it is good background.
I'd like to add some further background.
I worked in the Plant and Microbial Biology (PMB) dept under a postdoc who worked under one of the professors interviewed, Russell Jones (RJ) My son who just graduated in chemistry also work in this lab as a summer job. My father-in-law, Herbert Baker (HB) had been on RJ's thesis committee.
My working connection with this dept was two years prior to the Novartis deal. Since I had been to my father-in-law's lab many times over the years and my son also worked there in high school I got a deep insight into the difference between doing an older form of plant science and the new whiz bang model. Basically it was the difference between Darwin's voyage on the HMS Beagle and using a Mac to image the frames coming out of a machine used in confocal microscopy. As far as I am concerned there are some deep intellectual issues here as to what constitutes scientific knowledge and what impact that knowledge has on society and in turn how that bares on global development and ecology.
Where this division leads is treated briefly in Alan Rudy's study. One of the flaws which is minor to most readers, is the lack of development of the full implications of this division. (There is no way Alan could have known these implications, and if the team did, they were not part of the focus of the study. It might also have been more difficult to publish a study with inflammatory phrases like bio-corporate take over of everything that lives.)
The implications in my view amount to the political divide between those who want to preserve the bio-sphere which amounts to a vast knowledge base and those that are happy to make money on exploiting and controlling it. The prevailing neoliberal mentality for the latter, worked wonders to drive the breathless enthusiasm of the newer bio-sciences, while relegating the former to the dusty and forgotten labs where moldering specimen jars, reference works, and file cabinets lined the walls. HB's lab reminded me of pictures of the British Museum of Natural History which I imagine beyond the most popular and public displays lay quiet corridors and silent study rooms for aging scientists of another era. RJ's lab by contrast was packed with people at all hours of the work day, filled with bright new lab benches covered in machines and racks as seen in crime lab shows popular on tv. We worked in RJ's lab at night because it was so crowded during the day. Our experimental work was done in the utility rooms in the basement.
Two images:
http://bozent.com/tpo/images/BritishNaturalHistoryMuseum5.jpg
http://www.cropgenetics.cses.vt.edu/facilities/images/lab-3_000.jpg
My father-in-law's career was classic old world. He was educated at the University of London in the 1930s, served in the civil defense during the war, then moved to Ghana (then the Gold Coast) to work on topical plants until the revolution when he was hurried out by the new government. He came to the US and was hired at UCB. His summers were spent in the field, first in the US west, then later to tropical forests mostly in Costa Rica.
His career centered on the co-evolution of plants and their pollinators, with a focus on the biochemistry of nectar and the nutritional needs of pollinators. Here is a sample of current work in his field:
http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/98/3/503
If you click on the article, download and read it, you will see the first reference cited as Baker and Baker, 1982. These are HB and my mother-in-law Irene Baker (IB). IB did most of the biochemistry. But they certainly went further and tracked down not just sugar concentrations, but the proteins and lipids in their nectar studies and found direct correlations between the specific types of proteins and fats required in their pollinator's diet, and those supplied by the plants they visited.
Here is a sample of Russell Jone's (RJ) work:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC157399/
In brief, what the article is about is the metabolic pathway by which a cereal seed starts growth into a seedling. The aleurone layer (a membrane) begins a highly regulated digestion of the starches of the underlying grain after germination and passes those products via membrane transport into the growing parts of the seedling.
Political implications. If you have a detailed view of the metabolic pathway, you can outline the potential genetic regulatory components (hormones) and develop a molecular genetic model of how the cereal grain develops. With that knowledge you can work out variations of timing and production of growth driven by changes in gene expression of various biochemical signals that regulate metabolism. This knowledge together with the more traditional agricultural based data, give a quite detailed view of food crops. The potential value and control of that knowledge is what agri-corps like Monsanto, duPont, Cargill, Pioneer and others like Novartis are all about. This is neoliberalism's concept of plant science.
In contrast, consider the nectar study. It depends on a thriving and intact eco-system which ranges from low to high altitude of a complex forest system of species who have evolved in variation to a temperature gradient and other environmental conditions between a low warmer environment to a cooler higher environment. These are precisely the sorts of places mainly in developing countries that global warming and unregulated development threaten with depredations, most of which are the consequences that global neoliberalism has produced.
Getting back to the difference of outlook between HB and RJ. In many ways RJ and the current academics live for the most part in oblivion of the larger political picture. They are focused on the academic politics and finance of their work. That work seems politically neutral to them. And maybe it is at their level. It's potential uses, particularly in terms of economics seem distant. I am not sure they see themselves as a neoliberal marketplace of potential development. If they get that far, I am not sure they would see that as an altogether bad idea. This is naive in my view. Think what barley is used for---well beer for one thing and don't think that major brewers don't have foundations, like Coors for example. Think about the chain of corporate systems. For example ADM doesn't produce grains, they buy them as raw material from selected producers, and then sell the bulk to other corporations like brewers who in turn produce consumer products like a Coors tall for example.
In contrast, HB was acutely aware of the political dimensions of any study of the natural world, plants in particular. He wrote a book on the importance of plants to human societies, and their long term development dating back to the neolithic. One of his courses was Plants and Civilization, where much of the field material was drawn from Africa and Latin America as well as from European history. (He changed the name from Plants and Man to Civilization, but what he really intended was Culture or Society as social science would understand these terms). I think he was a socialist. A Russian colleague in Leningrad named a plant after him in the 60s.
There are further contrasts. In terms of the economics of HB's lab and RJ's lab. RJ was constantly up against budget problems. Lab space was so tight we (team of three) had two desks and a phone---tracking down chairs was a problem. RJ was in effect the executive director of a crew of postdocs and grad student assistants. He managed, I am not sure how much from NSF, NIH, USDA, and NASA grants. Novartis money was no doubt greatly welcome.
HB on the other had very few grants. I am not sure he ever wrote one for himself, although he must have been a PI since he had post-docs. His grad students got their money through the UCB TA system (which pays shit). His basic needs were for chemicals and some minor equipment, like cameras, precision scales, microscopes (old fashion type), vials and other materials most of which came from university stores. At one point I made them a couple of plexiglas boxes and spreaders for use with electrophoresis gels which my mother-in-law used for their nectar studies. In the earlier part of his career he wrote his papers by hand, and my mother-in-law typed them on a Remington portable that dated from the early 50s (which I still have). When PCs finally came out in the mid-80s they switched of course and also used the campus SAS system for statistical work. Before that, they calculated their statistical data with a calculator. They both grew up in the depression and their personal `parsimony' was legend. That was wonderfully matched by a total generosity of spirit, knowledge and time.
HB's work cost the university a salary, lab space and limited supplies budget. IB, taught part time at Mills and ran the lab at UCB on no salary. Back in the 50s and 60s their summer US field trips were done with a VW bug, notebooks, and specimen baggies. One of their strange preoccupations were weeds that grew along the roads and highways. They figured they would find the prefect weed, i.e. the most adaptive plant species. The general equation was maximum amounts of science and imagination, on a bare bones budget. HB's teaching load was three course divided between undergrad and grad, sometimes with a seminar and sometimes independent studies. One of the undergrad course was always a popular non-major elective.
I remember RJ's teaching load was absolute minimum usually a grad student seminar for those interested in the technical detail of his lab procedures and methods. These were cutting edge stuff. What this amounted to was the ability to locate proteins and much smaller molecules like hormones within the cell, membranes, and intracellular spaces through various methods including florescent confocal microscopy. Go here for a rundown on what this means and how it is related to metabolic pathways:
http://www.essex.ac.uk/bs/staff/baker/publicns.shtm
(The Baker mentioned is not related). Now I won't pretend I'd rather be out baking in the hot desert sun, pulling weeds on the roadside, than sitting in an cool lab running false color imaging software on a Mac. But it is important to be aware of what all that has to do with the society where you live.
CG
