Growing Pains for New Academic/Industry Relationships

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Abstract
Prologue: If fiction gives voice to certain anxieties that confront a society, then concerns about recent changes in academic/industry relationships extend far beyond the halls of congress and academe. David Blumenthal points out that the issue of foreign industrial control over major American universities forms the backdrop for Michael Crichton's 1992 bestseller, Rising Sun: “The concern about these new technology transfer arrangements is that they encourage closer ties between universities and industry, thus potentially threatening academia's traditional role as a bulwark of open and disinterested inquiry. In raising the specter of foreign control over university research in the United States, Crichton merely adds a nationalistic twist to a discussion that has provoked soul-searching and anxiety in American government and academia for a number of years.” Blumenthal, who holds advanced degrees in medicine and public policy from Harvard University, is a widely recognized expert on academic/industry relationships who has shown an enduring commitment to shaping and informing national health policy. He monitored federal biomedical research policy for Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) in the late 1970s and later worked as the chief health policy adviser in the 1988 presidential campaign of Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis. In a 1989 paper for The New England Journal of Medicine he drew from his campaign experiences to highlight why health policy issues are treated superficially in presidential campaigns and to suggest solutions for future elections. Here Blumenthal examines the tenuous relationship between the nature of academic research and the public support required to ensure further gains in medical innovation. He now is chief of the Health Policy Research and Development Unit, Massachusetts General Hospital, and associate professor of medicine and health care policy at Harvard Medical School in Boston. Five decades of almost unwavering federal support of university research in biomedicine have spawned a biotechnology revolution that holds dramatic promise for the public health and the U.S. economy. To make that promise a reality, the federal government now strongly encourages universities to facilitate the practical application of research results by participating in academic/ industry relationships. These relationships are yielding important health and economic benefits, but the new economic entanglements of U.S. universities also could undermine the public trust that has sustained federal support of biomedical research. Thus, efforts to speed the transfer of technologies through academic/industry relationships may have enormous effects on the government/university partnership that gave birth to those technologies.