When a big corporation acquired the research enterprise of an entire California university science department, it hoped it was sowing a bounty of discovery and profit. Instead, a new report indicates, it probably reaped more grief than it was worth. That is the greatest legacy of the nation’s closely followed and much-debated marriage between University of California-Berkeley and the Swiss pharmaceutical and agrochemical company Novartis. Today, a group of social and natural scientists at Michigan State University released a report commissioned by the faculty senate at Berkeley that examines the fall-out of an unprecedented partnership. It was a campus controversy that expanded to become a symbol of the tensions and angst over the very state of contemporary public higher education in California, in land-grant institutions, and across the country.
