For the past several years, a severe decline in federal funding for research has prompted universities to seek alternative sources of money primarily in the private sector. This new thrust to forge relationships between schools and industry, however, carries with it a potential threat to academic freedom. What educators most fear is that researchers will be diverted from the fundamental quest for knowledge to work only on projects resulting in profitable and marketable products.

In response to such concerns, leaders in the government and the business and academic worlds have begun to consider the many issues raised by technology transfer.

Three weeks ago, more than 450 representatives from schools and companies nationwide met in Philadelphia for the largest-ever conference devoted to the topic of industry university relations Hosted by the University of Pennsylvania the gathering was also organized by officials from Cornell. Princeton, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Washington Universities, and the Universities of Michigan and Texas. Also involved were government representatives, and top executives from the corporate boardrooms of IBM. Upjohn, Smithkline Beckmen Centus Dupont, General Electric and Monsanto.

While Harvard did not participate in this meeting the University has played a key role in similar discussions. At a California conference last spring. President Bok and a small group of university officials and corporation executives drafted a set of informal gindelines for research relationships, designed to stimulate wide spread discussion of the tops Harvard which has entered into several multi million dollar pacts is now building on those proposals as it reviews a set of formal rules for future, agreements with business.

What follows are excepts from three presentations made at last month's meeting.

Government's View

Rep. Albert Gore Jr. '69 D Tenn j. chairman of the investigations and Oversights Subcommittee on Science and Technology of the House of Representatives.

The implications of genetic engineering are so staggering as to frustrate efforts to assess them clearly. When the technology of celestral navigation was first systematized by Henry the Navigator, mankind did not know where their ships, so guided, would travel. Similarly, the newly-discovered road map to life itself will undoubtedly lead us to new worlds of which we now have no knowledge. To extend the metaphor. I am arguing that we need to take special care to have in the "crow's nest" someone watching not only for reefs and rocks but also for new land.

Before the end of this century, the human apply cautions of genetic engineering techniques will present us with some of the most difficult questions that have ever confronted mankind. It we can alter our own genetic blueprints, the potential for affecting the future of the human race, as we know it, becomes limitless.

Last month, I held three days of hearings on the scientific, religious, ethical, and societal issues inherent in human genetic engineering. During the hearing it became clear to me that our social, educational, and political institutions are presently unprepared to address these issues and that to a great degree an entirely new body of ethics will be needed to resolve them.

In part, it is the uneasiness, about our lack of preparation for these new questions that has created controversy about how biotechnology is developed, funded, and controlled. And all of these questions are confronted first in the university research community. As a result, we will all be relying heavily on universities to preview these questions with unusual sensitivity.

While in the past public funding has been the most exclusive source of university funds for research in biotechnology, over the last few years we have seen the development of new relationships between some of our most highly esteemed research universities and hospitals and private corporations.

Of course, it is not surprising that in this time of decreasing Federal involvement in basic research programs, universities are turning to private industry for support of important research efforts. Indeed, in some respects, this development is a healthy one and is generally consistent with the historical amalgam of university-industry efforts that has greatly benefited society in other areas. While such ties are in part encouraging, however. I do see several potentially negative aspects of these relationships that I think need to be fully debated. And in some cases, alternative arrangements need to be explored before these two arrangements set precedents that may be injurious.

First of all, if the Congress is to grapple successfully with the unprecedented implications of recombinant DNA research, for which it is still the principle source of funding, we must have a reasonably neutral source of advice on these matters. It would be disastrous if we were unable to receive neutral options from the best minds at universities and other research institutions because they were all on the payrolls of companies that have financial stakes in the outcome of the policy debates. It would be equally troublesome if truly neutral scientists could be found but could not discuss their work because of the financial relationships that their universities had with profit-making entities.

Second, and this concern is different in kind and degree from the others I will discuss, agreements between American research institutions and foreign companies raise the specter of undesirable technology transfer. I don't think of myself as particularly jingoistic or chauvinistic, but I am concerned that many of these initial contracts are with foreign firms. Regardless of our best intentions in the matter, and despite contractual niceties that attempt to respect American patent law, I am concerned that we are too easily allowing our basic research expertise to be converted into foreign profits.