[lbo-talk] More on bio-science in corporate society

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Sat Mar 13 14:31:57 PST 2010



>I would like to see Chuck Grimes work out in some details the politics
implied by his wonderful narrative of research at California. Carrol

I second that emotion! John Adams

--------------

Thanks for the reads, and kudos. Most of what follows has already been on list before, but here it goes again.

I think the larger picture is pretty simple and stark. Land grant colleges and universities were created to serve as research centers to improve agriculture and provide higher education to the non-elite. They were also supposed to educate professionals who served in state and local government agencies, training teachers for public education, training doctors and lawyers, training public health bureaucrats, etc. That was a fine ideal back in the 19th and early 20thC. But agriculture has changed from individually owned farms to corporate held production systems and now part of the global regimes of neoliberal US power. The effect is pretty obvious that food and medicine for example are now economic weapons. The destruction of Mexico's domestic corn production, Haiti's dependence on imported rice, the politics of HIV in Africa are examples of how this power is used.

The labs where I worked, were researching maize genetics and barley physiology. Our two plants were corn mutants and Arabidopsis t. I had no idea in was in the middle of neoliberal pig fest, until a year or two later when the Norvartis deal caused a huge stew among the grad students and postdocs (95-6). I had to work out the political dimension of what this meant, and as far as I am concerned it went far beyond what most of the science community could see. It was also the period of the international controversy over genetic manufactured organisms or GMOs. It was a accidental, but fantastic roller coaster ride into the neoliberal carnival political economy of the corporate world, scientific research and government. For example it illuminated what NFTA was partly about. That agreement was partly aimed at stripping Mexico's import barriers that protected the country's corn production industry, which in turn was cheap enough to keep most households in tortillas if they made their own.

Alan detailed out the more narrow focus from the faculty, student, and administration points of view, but all the bigger elements were there, if you had put them together on your own. The other aspect is the issue of patents and monopoly rights to living things and their components, which tied into the corporate system. I mean it is absurd that a private company can exclusively own a plant or animal down to its genome. You can not grow it, raise it, experiment with it, reproduce it or possess it without buying it and or paying a user fee. Mike Perelman wrote a whole book on all that, mostly to do with software as intellectual property IP. Even the lowly oral history project at UCB's Bancroft library which runs a California history project wanted me to sign a copyright waiver to tell the story of my work in a disabled students project. I got really pissed off at this. It's my story, you solicited me, and I am telling it to you for nothing. You don't own it, period. It was silly, but there are principles here.

This IP system obviously extends down to individual researchers and whether or not they own their own research or the university does where the facilities were used to develop the research product. All of this is also ridiculous in many cases, since federal agencies supply most of the research money. Now a private international drug company owns your research?

The twists and turns of this government corporate education research mentality are truly bizarre. For example, in the guidelines for NSF's education division, there is a grant requirement that the funded projects show how the research product will be `distributed' to the public. Sounds benign, right? Many grants blather on about a web page, or public computer network as the distribution system.

We were proposing a project (to NSF) to develop science and math teaching models for blind students in higher education. These things had to be three dimensional and physical, so co-outs like web page distribution were out. I went to track down how such models are distributed and found there is a whole subdivision of textbook publishers who package teaching models and sell them. The sciences and math are a particularly well developed market. I didn't know teaching models were big business. Well, that answers the distribution question. So I wrote it up, with a potential list of model publishers to contact. They are all well known: Addison Wesley, Wiley, etc. The proposal was never finished because the small team lost interest, and I finally went back to the grease monkey trades, broke and in several thousand dollars debt. My pet project that to do with group theory and euclidean geometry of 3-D. I knew a math prof who could get a critique and review...

There was one model I'll describe because it has some really interesting physics and chemistry behind it.

The basic idea was the work of our potential PI, (M) who was prof emeritus in biophysics. UCB administration abolished biophysics as a dept a couple of years before, but M still had an office and academic authority to manage grants.

The idea was two intersecting planes composed of square modules. One plane was a modified Mendeleev periodic table of elements. Go here:

http://web.lemoyne.edu/~GIUNTA/ea/MENDELEEVann.HTML

The perpendicular plane was drawn from the table of nuclides and intersected the element modules with their isotopes or nuclides as modules. Go here for that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_nuclides_(complete)

This would give both a electron shell or chemical view of the elements combined with their nuclear view. I really wanted to work on this. I knew plastic fabrication using acrylics. It was a potentially beautiful sculpture. M had worked out much of the detail for the first half dozen or so elements. I thought we could do it in a larger modular system, broken at the critical divisions (color areas) in the Seaborg table, or however M thought most important. We had several great afternoon sessions talking. I knew nothing about chemistry or nuclear chemistry, but this was a fun way to learn some of it.

I didn't go into the political dimension in the other post very much because Alan did the narrow focus in his book. In the larger view, universities are now seen as knowledge production systems that can be harvested by corporations through the IP system, so that pieces of what should be public knowledge are considered private products to be bought and sold for profit.

For example there were giant mergers where one or two publishing houses now own most scientific journals. The institutional subscription fees would essentially bankrupt most public libraries and many of the smaller college libraries. The whole system of knowledge for profit is much more thorough in animal studies and medical research, and of course completely insane when you get to the physical sciences, engineering, and computer science departments. In fact the latter created the military industrial complex that has now become the model for the agriculture, medicine, and health industrial complex.

The intimate relationship between the sciences, government and industry is not new. It has a long history going back at least to the French Revolution, American War of Independence, and the Royal Societies of the French and British monarchies before all that. The career of Antoine Lavoisier is an illuminating example. Most of the current system derives from the US Constitution and the Patent Office. After a quick look, I found an unlikely counter example we can get all misty eyed over:

``...[Ben] Franklin never patented his inventions; in his autobiography he wrote, `... as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously...' ''

Where the hell is that American ideal? Of course Ben got rich in publishing and printing. I am sure he didn't give away books.

Getting back to current events. This business of public higher education is partly funded on the backs of students through fees, which are translated into mountains of individual debt. The ability to raise those fees is used as collateral on UC construction bonds for example. That's the significance of fees and raising fees. How does that serve the public good? I think it is this concept, that fees are income, that drives the rise in fees way out of proportion to the consumer price index as shown in Doug's LBO 125. As Meister explained an enrolled UCB student automatically qualifies for 100,000 dollars of loan money. If the student fails to enroll, the loan payments become automatic.

In the middle of my reading `Universities in the Age of Corporate Science', I got a phone call from a bright sounding woman student from UCB working at the fund raising drive from an alumni list. I was so pissed I told her, don't ask me for money, go burn the place down and hung up. What I should have said was on strike shut it down, but by then I was martinis beyond liberalism.

CG



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