While centers of higher learning across the country have embraced corporate funding in a scramble for money, Harvard seems bent on elevating the practice to an art. The beauty of the research center is that everybody profits--except the public. Highly profitable drug companies enjoy the fruits of research at a vastly reduced price, along with the legitimacy granted by the supposedly objective academy. Harvard rakes in corporate subsidies and the potential millions that could be realized through licensing new drugs. The researchers themselves profit handsomely through their cut of the licensing royalties, their opportunity to become equity holders in the corporations, and potential consulting fees. The only losers are U.S. taxpayers, who unknowingly subsidize corporate America's profits.
While this influx of corporate dollars has not been directed exclusively at Harvard, many of the tentative steps and `innovations' in this new cooperation were made in the name of Veritas. Harvard often boasts of its independence, but this claim rings hollow when large parts of the university are contractually beholden to the private sector. Vice president William Grala of the corporate giant, Smith-Kline Beechman, acknowledges that his company's academic funding is intended for "the preservation of the system" and to "strengthen democratic capitalism." Although most corporate donors would not so brazenly admit to an ideological agenda, Grala's frankness is telling.
As if the rapacious profiteering of billion-dollar corporations weren't disturbing enough, the university-business alliance has and may continue to influence both the direction and the published results of research. The creeping influence of corporate dollars is perhaps felt most strongly in biomedical research, as detailed in Soley's work and John Trumpbour's essay "The Business-University Revisited: Industry and Empire in Crimson Cambridge." Always on the cutting edge, Harvard helped pioneer the practice of essentially selling research, a fateful innovation that surely lent much of the credibility needed to spur university-corporate relationships all over the country. "Harvard's example of signing these large contracts quickly spread to other universities on the East Coast," notes Martin Kenney.
In an arrangement described as "unprecedented in the annals of academic business affairs" by Science magazine, the Medical School entered into a twelve-year contract with Monsanto in 1974 that gave the drug giant the right to an exclusive worldwide license if it were to develop tumor-fighting drugs in exchange for $23.5 million. Trumpbour notes that by 1989 Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital had entered into 40 to 50 contracts with corporations, including an $85 million contract with Japan's Shiseido Corporation to found a research center devoted to finding baldness remedies, anti-wrinkle creams, and suntanning lotions.
More recently, Sandoz Pharmaceuticals received the rights to a potentially hugely profitable treatment for colon cancer funded in large part by the federal government, even though no Sandoz money was used in the research. Sandoz had struck a $100 million, 10-year deal with the Harvard-affiliated Dana Farber Institute in 1992 that promised the company exclusive rights to any discovery made by any researcher who had accepted Sandoz funds. One of the researchers had received Sandoz money for another project; the fact that none was spent on the colon cancer discovery didn't matter.
According to a Science article, close to 20% of Harvard biomedical professors have ties to corporations through stock ownership, consulting work, or speaking fees. Biochemist Mark Ptashne, for instance, made millions investing in the biotechnology firm Genentech, Inc. The injection of money into academic research has fostered outright fraud at Harvard in more than one instance. Dr. Scheffer Tseng and his supervisor Kenneth Kenyon, in one example, found Spectra Pharmaceutical Service's vitamin A ointment ineffective in tests. When Spectra went public in 1985, Tseng and Kenyon, both large stockholders, attempted to cover up the ointment's ineffectiveness by, among other methods, altering their placebo and secretly treating patients with additional drugs. Their real results were kept hidden until after Tseng and his family made over $1 million from selling Spectra stock, according to The Boston Globe.
Despite new Harvard policies that prohibit stock ownership or consulting while engaged in clinical trials, the divergence between the aims of science and business has resulted in other skewed research findings, some stretched and some openly fraudulent, notes Troupdour. According to The Boston Globe, the Harvard-dominated Cambridge BioScience corporation attempted to cover up data that revealed the low ranking of its AIDS blood test at the Fourth International AIDS conference in 1988. When Harvard biologist Walter Gilbert publicly announced that his company, Biogen, was the first to produce interferon in 1980 as a possible cure for cancer, Biogen's parent company's stock shot up; just months later the drug's effects were discredited by the American Association for Cancer Research.
Exceptions only highlight the grim rule. Nobel Prize-winning scientist Cesar Mistein, in an act of courageous defiance, recently refused to patent a major discovery expected to produce a billion-dollar market: "A patent would have meant keeping everything secret while we thought about applications--an outrageous insult to science. Patents are an intellectual swindle." Sadly, few scientists or universities share his perception.
Paid advice and research is a P.R. bonanza for corporations: "Professors who are funded by industries like the tobacco industry have money to travel to conferences, to do research, to get it published, and the industries make sure views friendly to them get circulated," notes Richard Pollay, a marketing professor at the University of British Columbia. "Views that aren't friendly to industry don't get funded." Substantial recent evidence supports Pollay's contention, including the $3.5 million dished out in one year by AT&T for research and testimony to professors across the country. By depending on the very topic of study for funding, business schools make sure that no critical scholarship will be able to filter through.
Chase Peterson, the College's former Dean of Admissions, emphasizes that he believes in "what the students are calling our monstrous corporate state, because it keeps America alive and the colleges should be turning out students who can staff it." Peterson's comments are only startling in their honesty, but there's little doubt that Harvard has fulfilled his goal. Harvard has been a widely recognized training center for elites and their lackeys. Many alums' unflinching and devoted service in the CIA and State Department has ensured that nothing (like Third World democracy) gets in the way of the American system and favorable business climates. When the next wave of investment bankers, corporate executives, foreign servants, journalists, and politicians graduates this year, Harvard will likely remain cheerfully complicit in upholding the status quo.