There has been a lot of conversation and concern over the proposed Energy Biosciences Institute at UC Berkeley. The UC description of EBI puts it directly into Pasteur’s quadrant of research that is both fundamental and applied to problems of importance to society:
The Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) is a new research and development organization that will bring advanced knowledge in biology, physical sciences, engineering, and environmental and social sciences to bear on problems related to global energy production, particularly the development of next-generation, carbon-neutral transportation fuels.
However, the controversy stems not so much from the nature of the research, but the partnership behind the project, which involves an unusually close university-corporate relationship:
EBI represents a collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and BP, which will support the Institute with a 10-year $500 million grant. EBI's multidisciplinary teams will collectively explore total-system approaches to problems that include the sustainable production of cellulosic biofuels, enhanced biological carbon sequestration, bioprocessing of fossil fuels and biologically-enhanced petroleum recovery.
EBI will educate a new generation of students in all areas of bioenergy, and will serve as a model for large-scale academic-industry collaborations. By partnering with a major energy company, EBI will facilitate and accelerate the translation of basic science and engineering research to improved products and processes for meeting the world's energy needs in the 21st century.
This relationship will involve both the presence of 50 or so resident BP scientists on the campuses of UC and the University of Illinois, and a shared governance (and funding) process involving both BP and the academic institutions. Details are still being worked out, but faculty, understandably and appropriately, have raised numerous issues relating to commercial influence on research and academic freedom, and the impact of this new entity on university internal issues of shared governance.
From my perspective, this partnership is another step for Berkeley towards a leadership role in what I earlier described (What business are we in? March 1, 2006) as management of the knowledge supply chain. In that earlier post, I suggested that one of the roles for universities in the future could be to both create new knowledge, and to see that that knowledge moves swiftly and effectively to the end users. This would involve new types of close partnerships -process networks (see What has offshoring got to do with research universities? Feb.22, 2006) - between knowledge producers and users working towards a common goal. Such partnerships need not be either exclusive or permanent, but would focus on an area where the partnership could bring mutual benefit. Of course, many partnerships already exist between academe and industry, but this EBI arrangement, through its scale and aspirations (including creation of the new discipline of Energy Biosciences), would seem to move to the next plane.
The general rules that will both constrain and enable these higher level partnerships do not yet exist, and so need to be worked out carefully such that the changes such partnerships bring to universities are appropriate and beneficial. In this case, it is very useful that both Robert Dynes, President of the UC system, and Robert Birgeneau, Chancellor of UC Berkeley, have distinguished careers in both industry and academe. Thus, they can see more clearly than most the benefits and the dangers that can flow from such a deepened university-industrial arrangement.
Another risk of such partnerships, even when well thought out, is that public perception of the corporate partner may take a turn for the worse, and this can pose a challenge to the reputation of the university partner. The UC system already has seen controversy relating to acceptance of relatively minimal research funds the tobacco industry - imagine what could happen here if BP suffers a few more environmental disasters that give it a very negative image among the general public.
Even with all of these problems, however, there are very real and powerful benefits to be obtained if new forms of university-industry relationships that both create new knowledge and rapidly apply that knowledge to societally useful ends can be successfully invented. It will be very interesting to see how this progresses!
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