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Deserving though the biologists may be, their new role raises a real concern. Traditionally, university researchers toil in their labs, usually at the taxpayers' expense, doing basic research—that is, research promising fresh insights into the fundamental truths of nature, regardless of the prospect of immediate payoffs. The bioengineering firms, by contrast, must set their sights on quick returns. Will the new alliance between industry and academia destroy the old objective "purity" of science? Will scientists still freely exchange information or lab specimens, as they have often done in the past, if they know a colleague works for a rival firm? Will they forsake long-term investigations into nagging questions like the origins of cancer in favor of faster and more lucrative projects that might, for example, produce a new tranquilizer?
It was just such questions, asked by faculty members, that prompted Harvard to decide against taking part in a gene-splicing firm founded by Moleculer Biologist Mark Ptashne, even though the venture might have pumped some needed cash into the university's coffers. Stanford's president, Donald Kennedy, a biologist himself, is urging his colleagues to use "caution and deliberation" in responding to the flurry of overtures from gene-engineering firms. Reason: potential conflict of interest between pure science and the demands of their commercial employers.
Bitter legal disputes have already broken out. The University of California has sued Hoffmann-La Roche and Genentech on charges that a line of cells they use to produce a type of interferon was first created in the university's San Francisco labs (Genentech's Boyer was, and still is, a top researcher at U.C.S.F.). That case is still pending in the courts. But another squabble with the university has already cost Genentech $350,000, plus future royalty payments to the school. The money was awarded to the university for work done by one of its researchers on a hormone that induces human growth, which he brought to Genentech when he joined the company. Says John Baxter, the school's chief scientist on the project: "I really felt there should be some compensation."
Naturally, most molecular biologists now enjoying the new prosperity point out that collaboration between universities and industry is neither new nor dangerous. Physicists and chemists, they note, have long worked for private firms—not to mention the Pentagon—with little complaint from their colleagues except, in retrospect, over the atomic bomb. Says Boyer: "Industry is far more efficient than the university in making use of scientific developments for the public good."
The sort of efficient cooperation he has in mind is most evident in medicine. In January doctors at the University of Texas' M.D. Anderson Hospital in Houston began injecting cancer patients