Private Assets, Public Mission: The Politics of Technology Transfer and the New American University

Abstract

The rise of biotechnology, in concert with the Bayh-Dole Act, greatly intensified the practice of university technology transfer in which academic institutions take ownership of federally funded discoveries and license them as private assets. Technology transfer has become a site through which law, life sciences, and the idea of the “entrepreneurial university” are coevolving. Scholars of technology transfer have tended to describe the process of institutionalization as a smooth one, overlooking the important ways that it has been uneven and contested. Particular licensing controversies in the 1990s and 2000s demonstrate how certain prevailing assumptions of the entrepreneurial university have been challenged, and how the boundaries of the public and private domain are under active negotiation. In particular, controversies surrounding biotechnological objects like transgenic mice, stem cells, and pharmaceutical targets evince fundamental disagreements about the obligations of the research university in its new role as an investor of knowledge capital. These controversies have also helped produce new answers to larger questions facing the university as it seeks to negotiate its private and public interests. Faced with increasing political scrutiny from diverse stakeholders, university technology transfer professionals have been forced to develop new practices of public accountability. These practices reveal how university tech transfer has, over the last 10 years or so, brought the public back in. This trend should be welcomed, as it has the potential to enable both a deeper democratic engagement and a richer distributive politics within the American innovation system.

Keywords: Technology transfer, intellectual property, university, Bayh-Dole Act