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Big business on campus: the industrial presence at universities can muddy research--only with scrutiny can corporations have a positive role.

Article Excerpt
IN 1996, Petr Taborsky, a student at the University of South Florida, left his chemistry lab for two months on a chain gang. His crime was theft. He had "stolen" his own research notebooks, containing information about his water purification experiments.

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It's a story of what can happen when ideas become property, corporations enter a campus, and a university begins to believe it's really a business.

In the decade since, academic-industrial relations have become even more controversial. Consider Nancy Olivieri's experience at the University of Toronto. In the late 1990s, Dr. Olivieri found that an experimental drug posed a risk to patients. Apotex, the manufacturer of the drug, cancelled the clinical trials and tried to prevent the findings from being published. When Olivieri published her findings anyway, the university (which was in the midst of negotiating a large donation from Apotex) failed to back her up. After contesting the issue for years, Dr. Olivieri was finally vindicated by the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons following an extensive inquiry. The university's decision to safeguard its corporate ties while failing to defend the open communication of research results was hardly exemplary.

Such controversies seem especially prevalent in genetic research. The 2005 release of Seeds of Change, a video presenting farmers' perspectives on biotechnology, is a case in point. Completed by a University of Manitoba professor and PhD student in 2002, its release was delayed for three years by the university. The...

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