When I joined the University of Southampton’s microelectronics group in 1987 after spending 10 years in industry, I shared some of my commercial ideas for advancing the group into the 21st century with my academic colleagues. To say that my personal vision of paradise was close to their vision of hell is probably a pretty accurate observation. Two decades on, I now understand why they felt that way. Science for Sale contains a lot of information that explains this vast difference in perception, and the book also does a good job of highlighting how academia and industry differ on practical and ethical levels.

My first worry on picking up the book was that it would be almost totally inapplicable to the current situation in the UK. Daniel Greenberg is a US journalist who usually writes about American science policy and practice, so I was expecting to find very little overlap with the reality of academic and business life in the UK. Much to my surprise, however, the overlap was almost 100%, with the only major discrepancy being the role of athletes in the US university system. As Greenberg puts it, “For bringing glory and public attention to a university, the science-related departments are exceeded only by the athletics department”. Thankfully it has not come to that in the UK — at least not yet. Indeed, as I delved further into the book, it became clear that Greenberg has done his homework — there are plenty of references to the UK.

In fact, our two systems are remarkably similar. Both do not do well at funding scientists right at the beginning of their careers and both have big differences in how much researchers in industry and academia earn. There is also the same low success rate for grant applications in both countries, the same movement of academic high-flyers (and their valuable grant money!) between rival institutions, and — contrary to popular opinion — in both the UK and the US companies provide only a very small percentage of a university’s overall funding.

The UK, as far as I am aware, does not have its own equivalent of the American Bayh–Dole Act — a piece of legislation that allows US universities to retain intellectual property rights over their inventions — but we nevertheless still encourage entrepreneurial academics. Greenberg touches on a major problem of academic entrepreneurialism, namely that if you publish your research before patenting the work, then your prior disclosure makes patenting impossible. Greenberg points out, quite rightly, that most patents do not blossom into profitable products but he does not make it clear that it is papers — not patents — that are the currency of academia, which is one of the reasons why it is hard for academics to become entrepreneurs. He does, however, correctly observe that most universities do not cover the expense of patenting and licensing an academic’s idea.

Although Greenberg initially tries to maintain a balance in the fields for which he discusses technology transfer from campus to industry, it is biotechnology that dominates the book’s scientific material. This is perhaps not too surprising as Greenberg is very fond of large dollar numbers, of which there are plenty where AIDS treatments and cancer drugs are involved, not to mention the lawsuits that follow these big-money trails. One example, which concerns the unfortunate death of two human volunteers during clinical drug trials, resulted in an explosive cocktail of events that drew in the supervising academic consultants, their respective university departments, the National Institutes of Health, and, of course, the lawyers. It all makes unpleasant and sobering reading.

A minor criticism I have is that the first part of the book contains far too much of this bureaucratic fine detail concentrated on this one topic alone. It is clear that Greenberg has done plenty of research, but I was left feeling rather hungry as I wanted to see such detailed analysis applied to the physical sciences as well.

In the second part of the book we see the academic/industrialist interface from the viewpoint of the academic, which for me was more interesting. Unfortunately, biotechnology continues to dominate and by the end I felt the title of the book really should have been Biotechnology for Sale rather than Science for Sale. However, Greenberg’s discussion with the Florida State University chemist Robert Holton finally brings to light the conflicts and problems encountered by academics dealing with industry. Holton played a key role in the 1980s in developing the drug Taxol, which is used to treat breast and ovarian cancer. It is refreshing to see Holton “telling it as it is” and being absolutely clear that he is against universities carrying out contract research for industry — after all, there are plenty of contract-research organizations out there to provide just that service.

In the following chapter we get a glimmer of a more positive academic/industrialist interaction from Robert Dickson, a chemist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US. The interview was undertaken early in Dickson’s research programme and it is clear that he was not only creating a lot of valuable intellectual property, but also generating a lot of commercial interest, and he was very enthusiastic and open regarding his work.

But as the monetary implications for Dickson increase over the following 12 months, what was initially a very open interaction between researcher and interviewer becomes more and more closed. Finally, just one year after Dickson’s initial interview with Greenberg, the door is firmly shut to the author’s enquiries about further developments in Dickson’s laboratory and his relations with the company that had licensed his research. It goes to show that a great deal can happen in a year in the life of a successful and innovative clinical researcher.

Overall this book does an excellent job of listing in detail the problems and the successes of trying to link the industrial world with academia in the area of biotechnology. However, as an academic who has gone through the trauma of spinning out a non-biotech university company, and then resigning from that company to return to the relative sanity of academia, I feel this book will be of marginal use to a budding entrepreneur–academic as a reference of what — or what not — to do. But then again, it is clearly not meant to be that kind of book.

Greenberg’s comments at the end of the very first chapter make an excellent synopsis of the entire book: “The pursuit of money is at the heart of modern university administration. The presidents [vice chancellors] are judged by their fund-raising prowess. Rare among them today is a statesman or philosopher of higher education.”