Focus 580; University/corporate Relations and Its Effect on Biotechnology Research

Good morning and welcome to focus 580. This is our telephone talk program my name is David inch. Glad to have you with us this morning. We are fortunate here being on the campus of the University of Illinois we get to draw on various kinds of talks by people who come here to the campus it's been a rich source of guests for us. One of the series that's been going on now since last fall is a series taking a look at the changing role of the university and much of this has looked at the meaning of the relationships and we see more and more of them all the time between corporations and universities. And it's a series that's sponsored primarily by the Center for Advanced Study there are a lot of other sponsors as well and I want to step on anybody's toes here but there too there are too many to mention and they'll be another of these talks today. And we're fortunate to have here in studio with us the speaker. And we do these things to try to bring them to a large audience outside of the campus area here in Champaign Urbana the guest is Michael Hansen. He's a research associate with the consumer Policy Institute which is a division of Consumers Union

that's the organization that publishes Consumer Reports magazine and his field of interest is biotechnology. He's the author of biotechnology and milk benefit or threat which was published in 1990. He's been largely responsible for developing the Consumer Union. Consumers Union's positions on safety testing and labeling of genetically engineered food. And he is here to talk about what this relationship between the university and corporations has to do with biotechnology research. Well explored in some depth but essentially the argument he makes is that the increasing involvement of corporations with universities in their research means that the profit motive is the number one thing. That's what you were thinking about and that's what drives the research and perhaps not so much what what would be good for humanity but what's going to make money. So we talk about this and perhaps get in some other issues say as well.

And your questions of course are welcome the number here in Champaign Urbana. Is 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We also have toll free line good anywhere that you can hear us that's 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5 so any point here you can join the conversation just couple more things about our guest. He's also written reports for the consumer Policy Institute and Consumers Union on other issues including household pest control alternatives to agricultural pesticides in developing countries and also the pesticide and agriculture policies of the World Bank and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. He's a graduate Northwestern University has a doctorate in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from University of Michigan and did post grad study at University of Kentucky on the impacts of biotechnology on agricultural research. Well thanks very much for being here. Thank you I'm glad to be here. So I guess I gave the the headline maybe we can talk in a little bit more detail about this. The argument that you're making perhaps we can also give some examples that they're

increasingly as more and more as these partnerships become more common putting corporations in universities. That is the bottom line is whatever research is done is going to make money or not. Right you're seeing these increasing university industry connections and it's coming to the point that a lot of universities see there are almost a viewing themselves as as businesses. I think the most recent deal that is has particularly trouble people is at the University of California one whole division in the College of Natural Resources at the University of California at Berkeley. No Vargas had paid twenty five million dollars to the university and exchange what they'll get is there they will get access to 30 to 40 percent of all the inventions that come out of this department add to Berkeley regardless of whether Novartis funded them or not. So you have

a one corporation actually having. Straight direct ties with one with one university with an entire D department that raises questions of will work that it is not profitable still be done. We'll work that's in the public interest be done. And that deal has already gone through what they're talking about not which is even more controversial is for the University of California wide system to talking about setting up three of these genome worker centers for to the tune of 300 million dollars of which 100 million would come from the state and 200 million would come from the private sector. The problem with these increased government industry interactions that at least in the area of biotechnology is I think that the general public who used to look for universities as neutral sources of information they don't perceive that now anymore they perceive

most universities as being proponents of this technology because of their connections with these companies. Well what should it necessarily be the case of that research that is profitable. I mean why can't why can't research as a profitable also be in the in the public interest. Something that has a general public good. I mean do we immediately assume that those two things can't go together. No not at all. I think that it is good to try to take work that is done at basic science institutions and get that out to the general public in the form of technology what's disturbing with the government with these university industry connections is now you're starting to see scientists who are doing work in certain areas functioning being in a conflict of interest having an economic stake in some of the work they're doing that if their research turns out positive they might make themselves millions of dollars. So they're no longer

the disinterested academic and in fact studies have shown over and over that many folks at these universities have these financial conflicts and they're not being reported either to their sometimes not to their universities but very frequently not to people not to journals where they publish articles in. So if you look in medical journals and you see an article which says that a certain drug is good you might not know that that that author has gotten large sums of money from the drug company. And if you knew that you might then take their research more with a grain of salt because they have an economic interest in it so you're getting away from the sciences supposed to be about the dispassionate search for truth and looking at information once people start to have financial ties. It can cloud things in ways they don't even realize because most of the scientists will say well just just because I'm making a bunch of

money that's not going to impede any of my science I will still do just as good science as before they even get offended that you might suggest that. That the economic motivation might influence what they do. But there are a number of studies out there in the literature that clearly show that those conflicts of interest do have an impact. So you can look at studies that have been done for example where they look at drugs certain drugs for diseases and then they look at all the articles that come out over a two year period look at hundreds of them and then classify the authors as either. It connected to the industry having financial connections or neutral and you can look and see the papers that they do and you'll see that folks that do have an economic interest or work for have contracts with a company. Their articles tend to be much more positive about

those drugs than somebody who's not getting money. And this has been done with a large enough sample sizes that you can show that this is these are statistically significant results. So the data do in fact show that the money can influence. And it's just gotten to be so pervasive that that it really raises questions not only about the university and industry connections but even at the government level as well because on a lot of federal committees there's for example conflict of interest guidelines saying that if you're going to sit on a committee of the Food and Drug Administration you have to disclose all your financial conflicts. It used to be that if you had a direct financial interest they wouldn't let you on one of these committees not how research is showing that they're routinely granting waivers of exemptions USA Today just last year did a study where they looked at all the. All the FDA advisory committees that met between June

1st 98 and June 30th 1999. No I'm sorry June 30th 2000. Right. And there were a hundred and fifty nine committees. What they found is that at 92 percent of those meetings one at least one member had a financial conflict of interest. Ninety two percent of the meetings. If you look at 55 percent of the meetings over half of the advisors had a conflict of interest. If you look at the meetings where they were talking about broader issues about how you regulate like what should be on warning labels these sort of broader issues. Ninety two percent had conflicts. That means by the narrow definition of the Food and Drug Administration they have an economic interest in the topic under discussion. And yet the FDA is allowing these people to sit on these committees and just in that year and a half process over 800 times they waive those. Conflict of Interest regulations

and one that was even talked about was the case with a antibiotic that Johnson Johnson was trying to put through. And it turns out the person that was on the FDA committee who was the consumer representative supposed to be representing that the consumer at large. Turns out it was somebody who helped design the drug trials for Johnson and Johnson and had a long history of being a consultant with him. That was the consumer representative on the panel. I mean that's. Let me at this point probably I should introduce again I guess for anyone who's just tuned in we're talking with Dr. Michael Hansen. He's a research associate with the consumer Policy Institute which is a division of Consumers Union. Those are the folks that publish Consumer Reports magazine he currently works on biotechnology issues. He's here in Champagne Urbana visiting the University he'll be giving a talk on this very topic looking at university corporate relations and the effect of those relations on biotechnology research part of a continuing series looking at the university's changing role and for people who are in and around Champaign-Urbana beginning as

talk at 4 o'clock. This afternoon in the auditorium of the law building at the College of Law on the campus and that's free and open anybody would like to attend so anybody who wants to stop by and hear more from him you can do that. And here of course your questions and comments are welcome to 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. Toll free 800 2 2 2 9 4 5 5. I wonder if you can answer this question and that is how over time the proportion of funds that come from government and from private business has changed because it's my assumption that there would have been a time when I don't know how long in the past there would have been a time when more money for the kind of research that we're talking about came from the government from the federal government from the state government and less from private business and that that has shifted dramatically and now. More money comes from private business than comes from government but I guess I'm just kind of wondering

if you can talk someone specific about about that right for the corporate giving. I think things need to get tied to. There were two key regulatory actions that happened one was in 1980 and that was the passage in Congress of the by Dole act and by Dole act was the one that for the first time allowed universities to patent the results of federally funded research before that any any research that was done in the public universities with public funds couldn't be patented for private benefit by the universities it had to be freely available to the public at large. That changed in 1980 and that was when you then start to see movement toward more corporate money coming in. But even more important than the buy Dole act in 1900 in 1905 you had the federal Technology Transfer Act and that's what mandated the setting up of these they're called credo is cooperative research and development

agreements where they actually pushed and I mean the government too. Start in their funding to basically fund these sort of joint ventures if there look like there is research being done in a lab which could be commercialized. Then it was saying that it was OK to set up these cooperate research and development agreements. It was at that point that individual scientist they were working for the government or in academia could now sort of set up companies and literally make millions of dollars. What we've seen since then is in one thousand eighty in one thousand eighty five corporate giving tackling was eight hundred fifty million dollars. About ten years later in the mid 90s it was four point to five billion. So there's been. That's a five fold increase in less than 10 years. And in general I do know that there is declining federal funds

going into the land grants those are that's typical what's called Hatch grant funding the funding for agricultural research has functionally stayed stable in the United States or declined. Where is the corporate money has gone up let's see. From 1990 one thousand eighty to one thousand ninety eight funding for academic research that corporations did expanded at the rate of eight point one percent. That's 1.9 billion in 1907 and that's nearly eight times the level of 1080. OK. We have a couple callers let's we have somebody else cell phone so we'll get right to them. One number four. Hello. Yes hi I totally agree that what you're saying about the corporations and filtration and research. Oh I think that in academia although if you look back historically we notice that the University of Chicago a number of other prestigious places today were infiltrated

with corporate funds and still are. And I think that. We know that government and government officials are infiltrated with corporate money. Money just unfortunately has a way of infiltrating in all areas and I don't know if this is something that is such a big trend that we can stop or alter but I do know that in another sense that a lot of the scientists that maybe do the studies of course want more grants but then again in another sense they want to be respected as a true scientific person that has important data and does important studies that are among their colleagues. So I think that you're absolutely right about that. To you no invasion of science to some extent but to the bottom line comes if the results aren't there and it can be proved consistently

that these things don't hold up. Even though some studies are definitely a slanted and tweaked it to some extent. But if you mean with Upon extensive evaluation of these studies often the true scientists know what what is right and what is wrong and what is correct then and then I think sometimes they're winking at the corporations providing them with certain kinds of studies but everybody knows that they are. They're weak as water so to speak so that's simple. My comments I'd like to see. Well I sort of agree with some of the things you said but while it is true that the University of Chicago and others have been getting corporate money I think the difference in the field of more general biology is that that really wasn't the case 30 or 40 years ago 30 or 40 years ago in fact people would be looked down on if they would be working on things that had an economic impact because you were seen

as then you're not interested in doing the research for the sake of the knowledge you're interested in doing it for grubby monetary concerns. And I think you know Jonas Salk was once asked about patenting the polio vaccine and he thought it was a crazy idea he looked and sort of said would you patent the sun. So there really has been a sea change I think in the the sort of mindset of a lot of young researchers nobody now seems to bat an eye with doing research at the university that then will lead to setting up a company that will make you millions of dollars overnight. Nobody seems to think that there's anything wrong with that whereas 30 years ago that would be unthinkable an academic who tried to do that would be shunned by many of their colleagues and that just has dramatically changed as all this money has come flooding into the life sciences to take the devil's advocate.

I'm going to agree with what you're saying in essence in some respects but capitalism doesn't work unless the customers satisfy neighborhood and real products are developed that are real need. And I think you know what you're saying is correct but I think in another sense. Capitalism and its slow process we doubt these things that are. The imitation things are really not important breakthroughs. Eventually. Well yes and no. If you look at capitalism does do a number of wonderful things but we do have a whole PR industry and there's a wide range of products out there that really don't have meit's usefulness but with enough PR you can convince people that they need it. The other problem that I actually see is it's an opportunity cost it's all this money is going into certain areas where more money can be made because that's what the market is good at. But the kind of research

which is truly in the public interest and that the market can't supply that's what should be doing that's the kind of research that our public universities should be doing and they're increasingly not doing that. A perfect example is if you look at the field of classical biological control that's where you have an insect past. And actually the reason it's a past is it's not native for example to get to to the United States. It comes from some other country and is now causing problems here with a classical biological control what you do is you understand the biology of that past. You go to where it's where it normally comes from. You find the other. Insects or other organisms which naturally control it and you bring it back and release it. So a perfect example is over 100 years ago in California the in the late 1880s the citrus industry was on the verge of collapse. The reason was for a little insect called the cottony cushion scale. They tried to at that time the pesticides they had weren't working and the citrus

industry was faced with basically collapse. Well what the university did is they sent a scientist over. He went to Australia. He found because that's that's where the scale comes from. And he found one of a series of paths a series of predators but particularly the Vidalia beetle brought that back to California and when he released those beetles they spread by themselves naturally controlling the cottony cushion scale thereby saving the citrus industry and the. They've been saved ever since. Because once you released that natural enemy it naturally controls the past and so you don't need to come back and do anything more. Now that's a classic example of classical biological control. That's something that the market can never ever produce and the reason for that is is in economic terms what a classical control agent is. It's a product that destroys its own market because even with you come up with this great insect Once you

release it and it spreads by itself well you can only make one or two sales. Classical biological control has done wonderful things in the US and many other countries. And yet in the at the University of California the division of biological control which was started almost 100 years ago is the premier one in the world that has now been shut down and instead they're doing a lot of genetic engineering work. So there's an example of the kind of research which is not being done or research looking into agricultural ecology to ecological relationships. Between paths and plants and there and of firemen lots of that kind of research doesn't yield to any kind of product that can be sold or patented but it can lead to knowledge which is useful and in the public interest but is not something that the market can provide. So while I think that there are many useful things that the market can do. Part of what public sector research has to do is look at those areas that the market can't

supply and find out things that are in the public interest and do that and by increasingly focusing on these for profit things what you have is a lot of scientist working on areas that will potentially make them a whole bunch of money and their graduate students then become people that are whose work is will ultimately serve a for profit and while some of that isn't bad. Where is the general public sector research that is in the interest of the public at large. But it's something that doesn't necessarily generate product which you can get a profit. We are at our midpoint I appreciate the comments of the caller we have somebody else will get right to in just a moment. I want to introduce Again our guest We're speaking with Dr. Michael Hansen he's a research associate with the consumer Policy Institute division of Consumers Union the publisher of Consumer Reports magazine he works on biotechnology issues. He has worked on developing the Consumer's Union positions on genetically engineered food.

He has also written reports for the consumer Policy Institute and Consumers Union on pest control both for the household and in agriculture and he's here to talk about this very subject. Relations between universities and corporations and what that means for bio technology research is going to be talking on this topic this afternoon on the campus 4:00 o'clock at the auditorium of the law building so anybody who's around Champaign-Urbana can hear what he has to say and hear on the program if you have questions you may call 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 4 champagne Urbana folks we do also have a toll free line good anywhere that you can hear us around Illinois Indiana and anywhere the signal travel 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. There's a caller in Atlanta. The line number two. Hello. Good morning gentlemen. Yes. This little discussion here might be a little bit irrelevant but I think it might be off topic but maybe relevant I was on a long distance train trip this summer and happened to have lunch with a lawyer from the

Department of Agriculture and what his job was was he would let a gate against door bring to prosecution people that were violating food safety issues particularly in the packing industry and importing industry and one of his really really scary comments which is where my question leads is if they knew that our conversation went to the impending election and he said you know that he was really fearful that if the administration changed it you know that it was barely enough money in the. Agriculture Department funded for food safety as it was particularly to do the testing. And he thought with the new administration coming in that it would be absolutely a nightmare that the large companies would be able to kind of run unabated in that area would have any comment on that conversation. Yes I actually know some people that do similar kind of work and they're just as concerned

as you say they are. Part of problem with some of the food safety work is I know that since USDA they actually controlled the meat and poultry supply they're responsible for its safety. They're in this whole process of they want to get away from inspections where you have physical government inspectors inspecting in some of these plants and they're proposing to do pilot projects where the companies themselves will self monitor with just a little oversight done from the federal government. And there are some people that have a lot of concerns about allowing the company allowing the companies to self regulate themselves on the safety area. So my concerns were justified from that conversation and the lawyers concerns are probably accurate.

Yes and there's also just a general consideration of there has actually been a huge increase with this globalization of all sorts of food and food products crossing our shores and if you look at the USDA and then the Food and Drug Administration is also supposed to do be doing testing they're not doing any more testing of foreign food items that are coming in and yet we've had this drew a dramatic increase in trade. So more things are crossing our borders from overseas and lesser percentages of them are being tested. So that raises potential concerns as well. Thank you very much. Cohen thank you and again other questions comments are welcome 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 2 2 2 9 4 5. Just again to be devil's advocate going back to some of the comments you made earlier particularly in conversation with the other caller. There is precedent in hard sciences for researchers who work at universities to benefit economically from their

work. And I guess I'm not quite sure why it should be a problem for people in the life sciences to do that and whether we should expect them to. You know as they're sitting in their offices they're looking across the campus at their colleagues who work in areas like electrical engineering for example and computers and they see them making lots of money from spin off from their research and why should we say that people in life sciences shouldn't also be able to do that or anybody should be able to do that. Well there is actually if you want to look at that there are some people who have questioned some of the kind of patents that are being allowed on software but electrical engineering I mean I don't know those fields as much so I don't know what kind of money we're talking about but I can tell you in the life sciences now I mean you're talking about people setting up companies and literally making tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars on their own research and I just think that is a different order of magnitude that then draws people into basically chasing the chasing the

money. And I think in the life sciences the potential downside for that is when you're looking at agricultural science you might decide to pursue. Which I think they are a high tech genetic engineering approach and this sort of more sustainable ecologically based approaches are being is ignored or actually giving they are getting some money from the government but it's a pittance. It's less than 1 percent of you know total AG funding so it's really small amounts. To do this sustainable work. And I guess I haven't seen an engineering although someone might want to call in and correct me but where as in some ways as much damage can be done because with life sciences when you're talking about medicine that's what's been looked at the most I mean it's gotten to the point that these connections between doctors and drug companies have really gotten out of hand. I mean it's to the point that they're there they're people that whose names

occur on publications who didn't write them. They're paid a sum and this stuff is ghost written by a paid public relations professional by one of the companies and then they get some scientists for 5000 or a thousand dollars to literally review it and then put their name on the top. So you have all this ghost writing and all these things happening with medicine where when you're talking about drugs that they want to approve that. Can have an effect on people's lives. Then you can start talking about negative outcomes there is the case a couple years ago with the the calcium the calcium channel blockers and that was work that was. People had touted these calcium channel blockers as being great in the early 90s and then there was new studies coming out showing that older that there was a risk of heart attack and I think stroke and certain portions of the population those

people had to fight to get that to get those studies published. After all the debate was coming gone there was an analysis done in the Journal of the New England Journal of of medicine. And what they found was that 96 authors who supported the use of these antagonist had financial relationships with the manufacturers. Yeah the authors who supported the use of them 96 percent of the authors who supported the use of kit these channel blockers. We're getting money from the drug companies compared to 37 percent of people that were critical. And this was a study that was done was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1998 and it clearly shows that there is a strong association between authors published position on the safety of those drugs and their financial relationship with the pharmaceutical manufacturer. It should be pointed

out that this study I think looked at about 70 studies and in none of them they found were those financial conflicts revealed in the publication. So the this article argues that you have to have full full disclosure. So when you're talking about drugs and other things you can potentially cause harm. We knew that there were drugs put on the market that it's the supposed science said they were fine like this diet drug Fen-Phen and then a couple years later oops it's showing us that it's not good and we have to pull it off. Well when you start to realize that people that are writing good things about these drugs are getting money from the manufacturers. That is that doesn't necessarily bias. The research that gets done but it's something that definitely needs to be taken into account because if you look at research for example that suggests that secondhand tobacco smoke isn't a problem if it's being funded by the tobacco companies you tend to take that with a much larger grain of salt than if it's by a

researcher who has no connection at all to the company and I think the average person on the street realizes that the appearance of conflict is important because if you have an economic interest in some kind of result of then you can't really be considered to be completely neutral on and that's why a Consumer's Union for example we publish Consumer Reports we have a very strict policy we can have no connection with the for profit. We cannot accept gifts or anything and the reason for that is some somewhere down the road we might have to test one of those company's products and if we accepted a gift or if I travel to a meeting. Even to criticize a company if they paid for it down the road. If we catch something of theirs and we give it a good rating people might say well did you do that because you literally thought that was the best. Or could the fact that you've gotten this money four years ago in in fluence you that's why Consumers Union has it completely strict policy.

Well academia and other folks don't. And they'll argue these scientists who are making millions of dollars they'll argue that they don't see any conflict that no this would never interfere with their science but yet when you look at the research that gets done in technical publications you see that it does influence while here and I know at the University of Illinois for example there is I mean even we are required every year to fill out a form to disclose any conflicts that we might have. But it sounds as if you're suggesting that that one of the. Best ways to make this clear would be for the publications that publish the research papers the journals on and so forth. They say you would say that should be required in a very clear way right there on the paper. If there is a conflict that oh of the author it should be absolutely and in fact the New England Journal of Medicine has some of the strictest policies they for example Rick require full disclosure and they've taken it a step further they've

said that for editorials that are written about drugs or other products they will not allow anyone to write an editorial that has any financial connection to the company in to the company who's who makes the drugs that are being talked about in the review article. Now they've actually even though they have the strictest policy they've fallen down on that a number of times one example that I'll tell you about is in 1906 the New England Journal published there was a book that came out called living downstream and it was by Sandra Stein Graber and it's a cancer survivors. Look at the whole issue and she of course focuses on a lot of environmental and other concerns. Well there was a review of that article of that book that appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine which slammed it and said that this is hysterical all etc. etc. The author was given as Ronald I think his name was Burke and he was just identified as an M.D. or and

or Masters of Public Health. What. What they didn't reveal was that he was worked for W.R. Grace which of course is a big company that produces a lots of toxic chemicals which have polluted the waterways and in fact they're infamous because in Massachusetts there was a book written about a movie made called a civil action about where W.R. Grace by releasing some of their chemicals actually had to pay a gigantic fine for poisoning the groundwater and then trying to hide that information from the Environmental Protection Agency. This was happening literally in the New England Journal of Medicine's backyard. And their explanation was for this work. Oh. They said Well we initially realized that this person worked for W.R. Grace but we didn't really know that that they did all this chemical stuff. Well the problem with that was wor Grace's

headquarters are in Boston which is where the New England Journal of Medicine where the editors actually live in Cambridge and it was all over in the papers there. And whoa burn Massachusetts which that was all over the papers 10 years ago and then when the movie with John Travolta came out it was all over the papers there as well and they claimed they didn't know. So but 10 minutes left here at have a couple of other callers who want to get to again our guest this morning Dr. Michael Hansen. He's a research associate with the consumer Policy Institute which is a division of Consumer's Union. He's here to talk on the UVA campus about biotechnology research and how directions in research are affected by the relationship between universities and corporations that fund a lot of their research questions welcome 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Have a couple Urbana callers here. First is one number two. Well yes it's a classic you know

research and research but the American Heart Association or maybe 30 year seemed to confirm what I think it is. Such people are much better for you in animals. But running into. That research was done on the phone because this is damaging to your health. Perhaps more so. And of course all the research is funded by the. That's the fad industry particularly the margarine makers. That said I hadn't thought about that but you're absolutely correct. That's a perfect example. And it went on for what 20 year. Yeah yeah you have to look that's an increasing example of where you're seeing some of these non profits so-called non profits American Heart Association other ones are starting now to do have these

connections with industry and that's that's also I find a little bit troubling as well. And I don't think the researcher necessarily have to be most certainly not criminally crime but even. Trying to distort the facts it's simply that the research is focused to get the right result. There is just too much pressure on the researcher when their money's all coming from one source. Yes and I think there is also pressure and it can be unconscious where not only is the money might be coming from one source or pop Radom way but when you have scientists that can set up their own companies so that some of their research might end up if it's on some product they might end up having the company that's that sells it and so they might stand to make

millions tens of millions or I've seen cases where people made over 100 million dollars. And when you're talking about those sums of money. Then that's even more pressure than I think just getting funding from a corporate source when you yourself can start making large sums of money on your own research that can have an effect as well. I think you're right. Another area that's been very disturbing to the agricultural research. The money comes from the large machinery manufacturers the chemical. Manufactory virtually no research is done for organic farming or even farming. It's only a medium sized producer and considering the serious thousand acres to be medium or small it's focused more of the time for producers. Rule 5 because you use chemicals.

That's actually correct but you're starting to see because of pressure from the other side that's starting to change minor. But there is funding the USDA does have a program it's called the syrup program which is for these alternative agriculture sustainable Wagenknecht in medium farms but it's you know minuscule it's I think one point five million dollars a year are no actually I think the sarra program is up to maybe about 5 million a year which is minuscule when you compare it to how much other money that is being spent but yes that is one of the problems with agricultural research in fact there was the unsuccessful but there was a lawsuit. In the 70s that went against the University of California system for the development of the mechanical tomato harvester and what they were arguing is if you go back and you look at the enabling legislation the hatch Grant in the Morales acts from the late 1800s that set up the land grant universities. They actually were set up in opposition to the elite private universities and the idea

behind them was to offer education to the broad masses of people and to do research that was in the public interest in the interest of everyone not just in the interest of the elite few. And unfortunately what's happened in the Ag area is all the research has sort of funnel toward the largest of the large and those folks and there is more pressure to reverse that and I think that is starting to happen but it's but it's at the margins and it is picking up but not nearly as quickly as it needs to. Interesting. Your book brought out hundreds in the streets. Secretary Freeman. That mediums produce insulin resistance and the skin is really going to go out as his new secretary of agriculture stops this profusion of books and destroyed any that were left. As I understand it and we stop distributing it. Yeah actually you're correct there and what's really interesting is the data is always

consistent if you look at the medium and smaller sized farm. They are more efficient. Just production of crops per unit area the larger farms aren't as efficient. But of course since they have larger areas and acreage they can ultimately make more money but if you want to look just at the strict economics and what's most economically rational it is the small and medium sized farms. I just hope the girl will forgive me for jumping in here because we just have a couple of minutes left and I do have one other person I'd like to try to include So let's go to another urban a caller this is lie number three. Hello. Yes I just think somebody should say thank you to the first speaker. I wish I could come in here like here but I missed the break couple days. Live your own woman. And I appreciate so much the work you're doing. And I also think I'm speaking for many. I'm very right. Thank you sir.

Thank you I will say I have been told if you have a computer I think they're going to webcast it as well thought oh you should be able to get access to it either as it's happening or afterwards because I have been told that I'm not going to use any slides or pictures and they told me that's better because it's easier to webcast that way. Well thank you very much for your work. Thanks for the call. It cost a lot of money to do scientific research. And the government is obviously not providing adequate funds researchers have to go somewhere to get the money so they're going to the private sector. What if the if the government's not going to provide the money then what. What choice do researchers have. Well I do think that the government needs to provide more money for the for research that's in the public interest. But I also think it's up to the universities while it's OK for individual scientists to look and to maybe

try to get some funding from corporate or other sources. The fact that it's happening on such a large scale and that the universities themselves are going this in this area that's what's troubling is that they themselves are deciding on a university wide basis that we want more of this and less of the of the kind of research which doesn't bring in money no matter how good it is I mean you're you're starting to see in some of these universities they're deciding on the east coast well maybe to shut down some of the humanities and other departments because they're not bringing in money and that's just the wrong way to go when you have folks running the universities who are starting to see the universities almost like a business and figure out ways they can make money with their with their patents and other things. Then the whole mission of the university starts to change. It would be one thing if there were a few scientists going outside to try to get this money. If the people that run the university still kept the public interest. At heart and we're very

sort of critical and set up all sorts of strange and requirements for disclosure and everything but they're not doing that. They seem to be running to embrace some of the higher tech stuff and ways of generating funds and that's what's even more problematical. That it's happening at the highest levels of the university. We are going to have to stop it at this point because we're at the end of the time for anyone here in and around Champaign-Urbana However I'd like to hear more from our guest Michael Hansen on this subject he'll be talking at 4 o'clock this afternoon in the auditorium of the law building of the College of Law in Pennsylvania in herb Anna and anyone who's interested in hearing more on the subject about the relations between universities and corporations and what that means for biotechnology research. They are welcome to stop by this is part of a continuing series looking at the changing role of the university. Our guest Michael Hansen a research associate with the consumer Policy Institute which is a division of Consumer's Union. Well thanks very much. Thank you for having me.