We – meaning you and I, dear reader – have paid for some really bad things through our public research dollars. Exhibit A: In the late 1990s the research arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture teamed up with Delta and Pineland Co. to genetically engineer seed to make it sterile in the second generation, thus forcing farmers to buy seed every year. This rogue technology was named “Terminator Technology.”
It’s not hard to see that Terminator was as anti-farmer and anti-consumer as any invention created. This hijacking of our research dollars prompted a group of us to draft a paper defining public interest research because we believed that when public money was involved, the public had a right to expect that research it funded would serve the public interest. It should add to the commonwealth and common health, not subtract from it.
In that paper we said that public interest research “will be identified by its beneficiaries, the public availability of its results, and public involvement in the research. These key benchmarks identify public interest research:
- The primary, direct beneficiaries are society as a whole or specific populations or entities unable to carry out research on their own behalf.
- Information and technologies resulting from public interest research are made freely available (not proprietary or patented); and
- Such information and technologies are developed with collaboration or advice from an active citizenry.
What we didn’t describe was how a public interest research agenda could be established and carried out.
A place to start is at the state level and the public universities. Wendell Berry proposed in his book, Life is a Miracle, that the mission of universities be the total health of their surrounding communities. If we built the national research agenda on the observations and needs of each community, aggregating the state agendas into a national agenda, we would have a path toward increasing the commonwealth. This is substantially different than the current mission of universities, which is to get more patents, privatize research and enrich corporations. The argument for the patent/privatize/corporate approach to research is that the wealth derived is returned in the form of taxes and jobs. However, too many essential needs of communities are ignored by privatizing science.
Setting a public interest research agenda is only the first step. Funding the research and making technologies widely available must follow. A vision for how to do that is being provided by the open source software and biology innovators.
Imagine this: states identify the research needs of their communities with the explicit goal of expanding the commonwealth and common health for this and future generations. Universities supply their expertise and provide the necessary research to meet those goals. If a new technology, pharmaceutical or machine is needed, it would be developed through an open source process and the invention would be publicly owned. Perhaps we could establish a scientific corps like the Peace Corps where scientists would do public interest post-doctorates creating open source technologies.
If we succeeded, perhaps we would have the antibiotics that drug companies can’t afford to develop. We could have the green engineering needed to create clean and green transportation. We might even find a way to restore the wetlands around New Orleans so that we worked with nature rather than against her in our bid to restore that great city.
Many of the pieces for this approach are already in place. Where is the political will?