A few months ago Berkeley and BP signed what may be the largest public-private research partnership ever. Over the next 10 years BP will provide $500 million to the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) which will conduct basic and applied research into the “problems of global energy production, particularly the development of next-generation, carbon-neutral transportation fuels”.
As examples of industry penetrating into research are increasingly common, the effects this has on what research is funded and how the results are ‘distributed’ are increasingly being scrutinized. While science has never been as isolated from business as we have believed during much of modernity (see how Pasteur’s research interacted with industry needs), the trend clearly increased and accelerated since the discovery of recombinant DNA in the 1970s. Over this same period, an increasing number of ‘traditional’ government responsibilities began to be carried out by private firms (public-private partnerships). Both trends combine in the BP deal.
What implications does the BP deal have for (i) research on alternative energy and (ii) the public research university? At a forum held on March 19th several university personalities involved in the BP deal explained some of the details. They described an almost bi-cephalous co-governing structure, where Berkeley researchers work in the familiar, open university facilities and BP researchers would work in their own, private facilities. Berkeley researchers will be subject to the same ethical and publishing standards they are today, and BP researchers to those of researchers in any private entity. This structure will be supported by a differentiated intellectual property structure: that discovered by Berkeley researchers belongs to Berkeley, that discovered by BP researchers belongs to BP, and that discovered by both is jointly owned. BP researchers will probably make up about 10% of the EBI’s workforce.
This tidy description offered in 2 hours of talks did not really delve into the details. The speakers said the details of the organization are still being negotiated. An answer to ‘who decides what gets researched’ referred to existing research proposal review mechanisms. Does this mean BP will play no role in deciding what their money is spent on? This seems unlikely.
Most of the rest of the 2 hours of talks focused on the need for more research into clean sources of energy. Some emphasis was also placed on the social science component of the EBI, with some resources being dedicated to studying the social and economic impacts of this research. As more and more NSF grants require that science research proposals consider the ‘social implications’, I left the conference wondering whether attention had been focused on these two ‘nice’ discourses (protect the environment from society, protect society from science) in order to distract from the gaps of information regarding the EBI’s structure.
Robert Reich has said that this deal will either be a feather in Berkeley’s cap, or a noose around its neck. However, even in the best case scenario (the EBI -which could not exist without BP support- develops major breakthroughs in clean energy production), the traditional freedoms and responsibilities of academic research –of which freedom from social scrutiny is one of the more important- are transforming into something new and different. Amid some scientists’ complaints over the past 30 years of government interference and social intrusion (see rDNA, GMOs, nanotech), it may be worth remembering that government is not as interested in regulating the scientists as it is in regulating the businesses, much as it has always done.
Comments
A colleague made some comments on this article that I would I like to respond to publicly because they are important.
First, in my original article I did not explicitly say that the University does have extensive review procedures in place to guarantee the quality and fairness of the research process. I do value and respect the efforts of Berkeley to be transparent, accountable and ethical in how research here gets done. I should have said this more clearly in the original piece.
Second, I do believe that public-private partnerships like this one are necessary in today's world, and in context, the BP deal has been well managed.
That said, the final organization of the EBI is still being negotiated. Hence, we still don't know how responsibility for what gets researched will be shared between Berkeley, LBL, Urbana-Champaign and BP (the 4 partern institutions). While I do trust that what gets researched will be published and patented in accordance to existing regulations, my main concern is how research questions are developed and decided upon.
This concern goes beyond the BP deal, and my reference to climate change and social implications as discourses tries to get to this. It is relatively easy for institutions and groups to fall into a standard line of thinking which hinders their capacity to be sufficiently critical of the underlying processes. In this case, given that the controversy is about the role of private money in public research, I was surprised that the March 19th meeting focused mostly on justifying the need for research on biofuels rather than in discussing the details of how the EBI will be run and organized.