Introduction

128 DIRECTED RESEARCH
icized UCSF professor Herb Boyer’s decision to form Genentech. Yet a
few years later he formed his own firm. Walter Gilbert, the Nobel Prize–
winning biologist at Harvard, raised a firestorm of criticism when he quit
his prestigious post to run Biogen. He retorted: “One half of my colleagues
at Harvard are involved in companies in one form or another.” 15
Over the years, numerous university officials, bioethicists, and scientists
have complained that the gold-rush mentality inevitably riddled academic
medicine with conflicts of interest and threatened the independence
of basic research. But those voices went largely unheeded. The
system of encouraging commercialization of government-funded inventions
has now become thoroughly institutionalized. A survey by the
Association of University Technology Managers found that institutions
of higher education generated $1.26 billion from licensing revenue in
2000, and university technology transfer officers said most of that came
from pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms. Government licensing followed
a similar pattern. In 1999, a Government Accounting Office survey
of the six major federal agencies with substantial licensing activity
found NIH with 990 active licenses, or 71 percent of the total. The public
health agency generated fully 95 percent of $107 million in royalties
the government received from industry that year. 16 Despite the fears of
Abbott and other pharmaceutical firms that licensed those inventions,
the government has never exercised the rights enumerated in the patents
issued for all those taxpayer-financed inventions.
Abbott’s plan to distance its protease inhibitor project from its government
roots didn’t sit well in Bethesda. Yet NCI’s Chabner, in a letter sent
back in early January 1992, agreed to the new terms “in the interest of
bringing this promising agent to the clinic as rapidly as possible.” But he
put his own twist on the meeting. NCI would continue to collaborate
with Abbott under the new circumstances. Abbott could reimburse
NCI for the preclinical expenses already incurred if it liked, but it was
Chabner’s understanding that future studies would be joint endeavors
and that “NCI scientists will direct and monitor these studies as usual.”
Abbott could go elsewhere for additional studies, but the joint scientific
board proposed by Abbott “will have the opportunity to review all preclinical
protocols.” 17
In March Abbott brought in a new man to run the clinical side of its
antiviral team. John Leonard, who had worked for a small contract
research house before coming to Abbott, was under strict marching
orders. “We had a decree from our CEO that we would accept no gov-