This brief discussion of biotech's background is meant to tell us something about science and society in advanced capitalist countries, particularly the USA. On a related subject (the so-called 'Green Revolution') I have tried to show elsewhere that private foundations based on vast family fortunes have a vital interest in maintaining the status quo.8 Paradoxically, this means initiating change - orderly change which will be of ultimate benefit to the dominant free-market system. Such change should, ideally, also reinforce this system's ideological and economic control over the millions of people who cannot be permitted any genuine participation in decision-making, since they might then decide to upset the corporate apple-cart and demand that those who pay the costs receive their share of the benefits.
The promotion of orderly change - which keeps the system resilient and lessens its vulnerability to pressure - is not a task which corporations as such can undertake. Business's time- horizons are too short; it must concentrate on immediate profits. Foundations, on the other hand, have no balance-sheets to worry about and are accountable to no one, except to a hand-picked board. They can wait as long as need be for returns on investment: twenty years before witnessing the initial effects of the Green Revolution; even longer in the case of molecular biology and biotechnology.
Furthermore, in our century one measure of successful national policy is the capacity to fund research programmes which cannot be expected to yield immediate commercial advantages, but whose long-term payoff will ensure the continued power (sometimes even hegemony) of the State and of the global corporations headquartered within its borders. Some might argue, wrongly in my view, that business is simply too dumb to recognize what efforts will lead to profits several years down the road. On the contrary, business is shrewd enough to wait for governments to make the investments, take the risks, eliminate the less viable and more costly prospects and, in the fullness of time, deposit the lucrative results on the doorsteps of the private sector.
Today's biotechnology came from the work of thousands of people who patiently dug the foundations, built the walls and raised the roof beams of an enormous edifice. These prodigious labours now accomplished, corporations new and old are crowding and jostling one another on the building site to put the final slates on the roof and call the whole place their own. The case of insulin, cited by Professor Jonathan King of MIT, is 'a clear example; most of the research on the biochemistry of the insulin molecule, the growth of cells in culture, the control of gene expression, the development of recombinant DNA technology was publicly developed; yet a few corporations will glean the profit off of the product'.9 It is thus not surprising that human insulin was indeed the first fully fledged biotech product to be mass marketed (by Genentech).
III
The existence of this new science-based industry has, naturally, provoked debate; in fact several debates. These can be classed by subject, which we will treat with unequal thoroughness. They concern (i) safety (will uncontrollable man-made organisms escape from labs and provoke untreatable epidemics?); (2) ethics (what limits, if any, should be set on human capacity to interfere with life processes and/or to create new life-forms?); (3) legal- judicial issues (what is patentable? who owns biotech products and processes?); and (4) the relationship between the university and business (what compatibility or mutual exclusion exists between free circulation of knowledge and corporate competition and secrecy; between social benefits of research and commercial applications?).
A more fundamental debate, of which the above would be subcategories, ought to be taking place, but there are few signs of it: who will (should) control biotechnology; what will (should) be its effects upon relationships between various social groups within the industrialized countries and, more broadly, between the rich and poor nations and peoples of the world?
Before trying to cope with the vast implications of all this, I shall first attempt a succinct description of the scientific principles involved (fascinating, but beyond the scope of this paper except as they bear on patenting and ownership questions); then provide a laundry list of biotech products, present and future; and, finally, recount some deals cut between academia and corporate sponsors and their likely consequences - negative, in my view - for the freedom and future of scientific inquiry.
The Genetic Breakthrough
Several readable accounts exist on the earlier history of DNA discoveries.10 Despite the huge body of practical and theoretical scientific work establishing the nature and structure of DNA (whose strands are the material support or substratum for any organism's genes), until the early 1970s it was methodologically and technically impossible to isolate these genes and thus to manipulate them. Problems of scale and the disproportion between the length of a gene and that of all of a given specie's DNA made genetic manipulation a technical impossibility. For example, a single gene represents about one one-millionth of the human DNA ribbon: how could one select such a minute segment for analysis and, even then, how could one obtain sufficient quantities in sufficiently pure form?
One successful strategy was the use of 'restriction enzymes' which are able not only to prise open lengths of genetic material at specifically chosen points but also leave sticky ends so that a gene from a completely different organism can be spliced in. Thus DNA from different organisms is 'recombined' and the function and behaviour of each gene introduced can then be determined by examining the new, different hereditary be-haviour of the 'host' DNA, which will replicate the introduced genetic characteristic. Specific restriction enzymes always cut at exactly the same place, and the bacterium (E. coli) into which the new gene is introduced will reproduce itself every twenty minutes - thereby solving the problems of accurate segmentation and sufficient pure quantities.11
Present and Potential Products of Recombinant DNA
The special character of recombinant DNA (rDNA) is its capacity to create entirely new organisms which would never - not even with millions more years of evolution - occur in nature. As Haldane, quoted in the epigraph to this chapter, predicted 55 years ago, one can now 'get a bug to produce compounds'. My examples are limited here to the productions of 'bugs'; classic techniques of plant or animal breeding (a slower and more empirical method of obtaining desirable genetic characteristics) and biological (though not genetic) manipulations such as 'test-tube babies' are not included.
Business Week and similar publications wax lyrical on the subject of recombinant DNA products. In a sense, it's easy to share their excitement. Genetic engineering could be the key to preventing and curing major diseases in human beings and animals, to cleaning up the environment, to higher productivity in farming. I shall first describe the achievements of the biotech industry neutrally, reserving the socio-political implications for later.
As of July 1982, researchers at Cornell's Rural Sociology Center counted 350 biotech firms.12 A year and a half later, Business Week spoke of 'an incredible $2.5 billion ... invested in more than 100 companies dedicated to pioneering new products from biotechnology'.13 Perhaps both figures are correct and we've already witnessed a shake-out of 200 or so companies in the initial running. Surely there will be many more losers before we're done, and any list of products, or of companies, is guaranteed to be out of date within days of its reaching the reader.
The winners, however, will be the IBMs of the twenty-first century. The US Congress Office of Technology Assessment has predicted sales of gene-spliced products amounting to at least $15 billion within fifteen years. Some commercial sources are more optimistic still. Pharmaceuticals were first to be affected by biotech in a big way, an industry subdivided into three: curative or defensive substances; diagnostic aids; preventive substances (vaccines).
Traditionally, drug company research meant tedious testing of compound after chemical compound to see what worked. Biological techniques allow instead the identification of the body's own defences against disease. These factors can then be reproduced in the lab and, eventually, marketed. The first drug to pass muster with the FDA
was human insulin. Growth hormones were next; several different sorts of interferons (which may be effective against some cancers) will follow. Other substances will prevent or encourage blood-clotting for heart patients and haemophiliacs.
In the diagnostics field, monoclonal antibodies are the stars. Paine Webber predicted in 1983 a market of nearly $4 billion for diagnostic products by 1988, with monoclonals bringing 25 per cent. The Financial Times notes that in the Directory of Biologicals, published by Nature, 'monoclonal antibodies, previously hardly mentioned, have proliferated to 83 different categories'. Nature itself comments, 'breeding like rabbits, monoclonals will no doubt overwhelm next year's Directory'.14 Feverish work is proceeding in hopes of producing a herpes vaccine; one against hepatitis B seems well advanced.
A related field is animal health care. Lots of smart money is invested here - for example, in molecular genetics, which is 'trying to develop a solid financial base quickly by concentrating on animal health care products, which the government typically approves faster than it does drugs for humans'.15 The first product marketed cures a disease afflicting calves, called scours. The President of Genetic Engineering, Inc., says, 'We are entering the era of embryo engineering' (in animal breeding). Another corpor-ate executive reports, 'Changes that took a hundred years are now happening in two months.' Direct manipulation of the genes of cows could, according to a University of Minnesota scientist, produce an animal giving 45,000 lb of milk yearly (as compared to 15,000 lb maximum today). That is, if one isn't afraid to milk it - it would be as big as an elephant. Disease resistance and other
qualities may also in future be spliced into target genes in a fertilized animal egg, or a clone.16
What gains does biotechnology promise for plants and for agribusiness? Two private think tanks claim that agricultural products issuing from gene-splicing techniques 'might be as large as $50-100 billion a year by the end of the century', whereas, according to them, medical and pharmaceutical applications would not ring up sales of more than $10 billion. This particular prediction may be taken with a grain, if not a bucketful, of salt: the two firms making it are selling their 457-page report entitled 'An Assessment of the Global Potential of Genetic Engineering in the Agribusiness Sector' for $1,250 a copy.17
A more conservative view is taken by the President of one of the major US seed corporations, Thomas N. Urban of Pioneer Hi- Bred International. He does not see genetic engineering replacing traditional plant-breeding techniques because it 'cannot simultaneously work with large numbers of genes, which is a prerequisite for most hybrid and variety improvement. Plants have some 10,000 genes, and very few of their characteristics are controlled by a single gene.' Recombinant DNA methods can nevertheless speed up present techniques. Urban also puts a damper on media hype surrounding the search for a corn plant able to fix its own nitrogen out of the atmosphere, thus eliminating the need for fertilizer. '[This] just won't happen. A nitrogen-fixing corn plant would have a 30 per cent lower yield' (because the plant would expend too much energy in fixing its nitrogen).18
Other companies are betting on genetically engineered corn as a middle-term prospect, but are most interested in improving its protein content or in making it resistant to herbicides. Herbicide resistance is an understandably hot research field. Now that nearly all seed producers have been purchased by chemical corporations, the possibilities for linking product sales are enormous: 'Only our seed will resist our herbicide'. It should soon be possible as well to splice genes that will 'express' themselves only in that part of the plant one chooses to modify - the roots, leaves, grain, etc.19
Corporations like Heinz and Campbells are interested in genetic engineering of tomatoes with less water, which could cut their processing costs and 'get more cans of soup per dollar'. As the Chairman of Agrigenetics, which is working on the problem, says, 'Tomato processors would like a wooden tomato' if they could breed one.20
Biotechnology is already an important factor in the food-processing industry. Future food will increasingly be fabricated food, made up not of plant or animal raw materials per se but of their constitutive elements, combined to make new products. For example, industry is not interested so much in 'milk' as in casein, lactose, etc. A report commissioned by the OECD notes that it will soon be more accurate to speak of a 'food extraction' industry, coupled with a 'food recomposition' industry. The first would separate the proteins, starches, sugars, flavours, etc.; the second put them back together, biologically modified, purified and stabilized into new foods I would rather call edible objects.21
The most potentially beneficial aspect of plant biotechnology will be its capacity to extend the number of natural environments able to sustain agriculture. Plants that prefer saline soils already exist in the lab; others could be engineered to grow in drought conditions or to resist low temperatures, thus allowing extension of farmland and earlier planting. This could lead to double or even triple cropping.
Outside agriculture and agribusiness, other applications of biotechnology are in the laboratory stage and may rapidly be scaled up to full production. 'Bugs' can be taught to latch on to certain minerals or chemicals and separate them from others. They thus hold promise for recovering valuable elements from waste material, squeezing the last drops of oil from nearly dry holes, or rendering toxic substances harmless.
Who's Involved? Corporate-University Bed-Fellowship
I am concerned that the flow of new corporate money into the
[biotech] field is having a negative impact on universities. There's not a molecular biologist worth his salt who isn't a consultant to private industry, and this will cut down the amount of basic research to be done on the public level. Free enterprise is a wonderful thing, but 'hot stocks' probably do not benefit the world of serious basic research.22
This not an academic spoilsport speaking but the chairman of one of America's leading seed corporations. Whatever his misgivings, university-corporate relationships have a long history in the US. The arrangements made since the advent of biotech do, however, represent a qualitative leap. When the first stirrings of the microchip revolution occurred, academics who knew computers and wanted a piece of the financial action left their institutions for good and went to Silicon Valley. Not so molecular biologists. Silicon Valley, so to speak, has come to them. There are three sorts of actors involved in biotech:
1. The major, established, usually transnational corporation that does not want to be left out of a burgeoning field and has the money to branch out. Most of these are chemical and pharmaceutical firms. They are beefing up their in-house research capacity and also calling on the next two categories.
2. The 'research boutique', usually founded by a couple of people with a couple of patentable ideas, good enough to attract venture capital. These are the upstart firms that attracted much media hype in the early '80s. A few of these knowledge- intensive companies will acquire the critical mass needed to become manufacturers and distributors while retaining their strong and indispensable R&D base (Genentech is the most obvious candidate); others will survive as specialized science shops as the industry diversifies and the division of labour becomes more rigorous. Most will disappear.
3. Entire university departments - of biology, medicine, plant genetics, etc., or individual members of these departments making a variety of contractual arrangements with corporations large and small, always with the encouragement and the endorsement of university governing bodies.
All activity in biotech today is the result of some permutation of these three variables: conventional marriages between a large and a small corporation or a university, or more complex menages a trois. Corporations are sources of money for hard-pressed universities; even the most prestigious have gone to the altar. In return, the companies are receiving unprecedented rewards, including, sometimes, the right to demand that basic research results not be published. These arrangements are so recent and there have been so few holdouts within academia that the case seems already to have been
closed before any debate has taken place.
The events now taking place around biotechnology reinforce the view that science is becoming more and more a commodity and a tool for controlling the national and the world economy. As such, it will be fought over, for enormous power and profits are at stake. Real political struggles concerning access to science will necessarily occur more frequently, and power relationships will often be expressed through control over basic science as they have been expressed over the control of technology (for example, nuclear or satellite technology). Such struggles are likely to be won by corporate entities (often transnational in scope) with assistance from the State. Whoever wins, we know that science has become far too important to leave to scientists.
The Corporate Campus: How Business is Buying Biology
Some academics are deeply concerned by business involvement in fundamental research. One is Leon Wofsy, professor of immunology at the University of California, Berkeley, who decided to speak out because colleagues he respected tended to see the question of scientific collaboration with business exclusively in terms of 'personal ethics'. Wofsy situates the debate quite differently:
The business of business is to make money, to beat the competition, and the mode is secrecy, a proprietary control of information and the fruits of research. The motive force of the University is the pursuit of knowledge, and the mode is open exchange of ideas and unrestricted publication of the results of research.23