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By Russell Schoch The hotly contested agreement between Swiss-based agricultural-biotechnology firm Novartis and Berkeley’s Department of Plant and Microbial Biology (PMB) came to an end in late November 2003. But fallout from the Novartis deal continues. That same week in November, assistant professor of microbial biology Ignacio Chapela--a chief critic of the Novartis deal and a researcher whose co-authored Nature article in 2001 rocked the world of agricultural biotechnology--lost his three-year bid for tenure. And the tenure case itself exploded when a member of the strictly confidential review process identified himself and protested the result. Some on campus proclaim that the five-year agreement turned out to be a successful experiment and that Chapela fell short of the academic excellence required for tenure at Berkeley. Others believe that Novartis drove a wedge between faculty groups and tainted the campus--and that Chapela paid the price for his opposition to the agreement and for research that raised issues the ag-biotech industry would prefer not to face. “The importance of Novartis,” says public health professor Bob Spear, who was vice chair of the Academic Senate when the deal was being brokered, “is that it raised the fundamental issue of the relation of the University to the private sector and brought that issue to a wider audience, including alumni.” The story begins in the mid-1990s, when the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology sought funding and access to genomic data from large biotech corporations. Gordon Rausser, Robert Gordon Sproul Distinguished Professor and dean of the College of Natural Resources (CNR) at the time, was the primary engineer of a deal with Novartis that was signed on November 23, 1998. For its part, Novartis was given first rights to patents on a proportion of the discoveries made in the department and also received two seats on a five-member committee set up to select research projects. Rausser asserts that the agreement was widely discussed and the process was open. But critics, led by graduate students in the College who formed a group called Students for Responsible Research, charged that the process was secretive and the agreement was approved under false premises. They contend that the deal was advertised as being worth $50 million--half to go to PMB and half to CNR to use for infrastructure and other hard-to-fund activities--and a promise was made to closely monitor the agreement from the beginning. But the final deal was for $25 million (all for PMB), and no formal study of the effects of the agreement was undertaken for two years. (That study, conducted by a researcher at Michigan State University, has not yet been released.) In the summer and fall of 1998, Ignacio Chapela, as chairman of the Executive Committee of CNR, sought to provide a space, as he put it, for reasoned discussion and debate about the proposed agreement. A survey he conducted showed that more than half of the College faculty members were opposed to the deal. But that survey was not released until April 1999, five months after the agreement was signed. The agreement drew widespread attention, including a cover story in the Atlantic Monthly that called Berkeley a “kept university” for its commercial ties to Novartis. Many scholars and universities watched with keen interest to see how the deal would shake out. Readers of California Monthly’s coverage of the Novartis agreement carried on their own debate over this highly charged issue in a record number of letters to the editor. Midway through the five-year agreement, Novartis and another corporation merged their agricultural businesses into a company called Syngenta, which took over the Berkeley agreement. A spokesman for Syngenta says that “some astounding science” came out of the Berkeley agreement, but that Syngenta’s focus changed from research to product development. The option to renew the five-year agreement was not picked up, and it came to an end on November 23, 2003. How, at its conclusion, is the Novartis deal to be judged? Most observers believe that what many feared--a giant business firm would shape research on this public campus--did not happen. Rausser says the objective of the agreement was “to provide first-rate graduate education to our students in plant and microbial biology,” and that is exactly what happened. Former PMB chair Bob Buchanan says, “It was an excellent thing for science on this campus” and “the [Novartis] funds gave a large number of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars an opportunity for training in their fields.” He adds: “It’s a dull topic. Only science came out of it.” But there is another legacy of the Novartis deal, according to graduate student David Quist, a founder of Students for Responsible Research. While he agrees that PMB probably gained more from the agreement than did Novartis, he says something important was lost in the process: a sense of collegiality. “I would call it an intellectual rift--a personal rift, even--between faculty and graduate students in the various departments of the College of Natural Resources,” he says. “And I think that by-product outweighs any gain.” Both Rausser and Buchanan deny that any such rift exists. Quist was co-author with Chapela of a Nature article showing that genetically modified corn had contaminated native maize in Mexico. A secondary conclusion, based on a new and complicated procedure called iPRC (inverse Polymerase Chain Reaction), was immediately and heavily disputed by scientists. (See “Food fight,” California Monthly, June 2002). Nature faced a barrage of criticism for publishing the paper, including an e-mail campaign said by the British Guardian to be organized by the ag-biotech industry. Quist and Chapela point out that all of the letters printed by Nature disparaging the research--including those from the Cal campus--were written by people with ties to the Berkeley-Novartis agreement. Although Nature did not retract the peer-reviewed paper, the journal later printed an unprecedented editorial note stating that “the evidence available is not sufficient to justify” the original publication and calling upon readers to judge the science for themselves. How to judge Chapela’s research became the crucial point in his tenure decision. As a first step, the College of Natural Resources voted in favor of tenure (32 to 1, with three abstentions). Next, an ad hoc committee, composed of five faculty members chosen for their ability to evaluate Chapela’s research, voted unanimously in his favor. But, finally, the campus’s budget committee, which is composed of faculty from across the disciplines and makes the final recommendation on tenure cases, issued a “No” verdict to Chancellor Robert Berdahl, who has the last say. Chapela’s teaching and service apparently passed the tenure test, but the quantity and quality of his research did not. The chancellor agreed with the budget committee and informed Chapela last November that, after this spring semester, he is out of a job at Berkeley. Was the process a fair one? One member of the ad hoc committee broke long-standing protocol by identifying himself and charging that the process had “gone awry.” He did not do so lightly. “I’ve been a member of the faculty for 25 years, and have served on these [ad hoc tenure-review] committees half a dozen to a dozen times,” says Wayne Getz, a professor of insect biology. “I broke rank because I was shocked that our recommendation was overturned.” In another highly unusual event, the chair of the ad hoc committee--whose name has not been revealed--resigned from the committee shortly after its 5-0 vote had been registered and apparently withdrew his support from its recommendation. “My question to the administration,” says Getz, “is who were the experts advising the budget committee to deny tenure, counter to a very strong departmental vote and an initially unanimous ad hoc committee vote?” He adds: “It’s almost like the budget committee, instead of representing the faculty in the tenure process, is saying: ‘The faculty wasn’t smart enough to give the right answer, so we’re going to change it.’ That’s what I felt the budget committee did.” Not at all, counters Jan de Vries, a history professor who once served on the budget committee and for the past four years has overseen its operations as vice provost for academic affairs. De Vries agrees that the budget committee usually goes along with the ad hoc committee, but “certainly not in all cases.” Did something go awry in Chapela’s case, as Getz charges? “I don’t know what he means by ‘going awry,” de Vries responds, “except that a decision was reached that wasn’t his decision. If that means ‘go awry,’ it happens every year.” Critics of the process also charged that a member of the budget committee during the tenure case, professor of genetics and developmental biology Jasper Rine, had ties to biotech industries and also made comments in his classroom critical of the Quist-Chapela Nature paper. De Vries says he looked into the allegations and did not believe thay disqualified Rine from service on the committee. “The strength of the tenure process at Berkeley,” he adds, “is that it can’t be swayed by any single individual. We have an information-rich, multi-stage review process, which means that no individual can hijack it.” Chapela plans to challenge the tenure decision. Getz is taking his complaints to the Academic Senate. Quist, who is scheduled to receive his Ph.D. in May, will leave the United States to pursue an academic career in Europe, which he says is more open to critical research in the field of agricultural biotechnology. “I fear that Berkeley, instead of being a place of free inquiry for the public good, is becoming a place of fee inquiry for private gain,” Quist concludes. How accurate is such a fear? And how well did the tenure process work for Ignacio Chapela? “We’re satisfied that the Chapela decision was based on its merits and had nothing to do with his political or scientific views,” says de Vries. “Allegations that the campus was pressured by agribusiness, or that a contract with Novartis put a thumb on the scale, or that having an outspoken figure on campus is something we can’t tolerate--all of these allegations are false.” The reason Chapela did not receive tenure is because his research did not rise to the “superior intellectual attainment” necessary to obtain tenure at Berkeley, says de Vries. “This was a challenging and difficult case,” he adds, “but the system worked.” |
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