6 Forces Driving More
Public-private partnerships have become more popular, yet they
bring their own challenges. At Michigan State, I supported efforts to
strengthen alliances with industry. At one meeting with several large
multinational agribusiness and food companies present, their candid
critique was that universities were lethargic. I and others, including my
college dean, took this assessment as a challenge. Over the next several
years, we collaborated with several of the largest food companies in the
world on what we hoped would be joint initiatives. While we enjoyed
our interaction, we met strong resistance to initiatives not offering
immediate and marketable benefits to their companies.
Our experience parallels overall funding trends and priorities. From
9 8 to 3 , agricultural production increased 69 percent. The basic
research that set up major agricultural innovations in breeding, nutri-
tion, pest management, machinery, etc. was publicly funded. The low-
hanging research fruit that followed—new hybrid seeds, chemicals,
vaccines, nutrition, farm equipment, etc.—was commandeered by the
private sector. Why? Because it was profitable. In 3 , more than three-
quarters of the $6. billion spent on food and agricultural research came
from private sources.
Slashing investments in public research would be easier to justify if
society were not facing problems of an exponential magnitude, such
as pesticide and antibiotic resistance, global warming, and worldwide
declining productivity gains in major crops including wheat, corn, soy-
beans, and rice. But we are—and weakening the platform for science
that funds the research to provide society options for moving ahead is
simply shortsighted.
Just as funding and expectations have been shifted, the same is happen-
ing with the third leg of the platform for science, the scientific method.
The practice of gathering evidence, analyzing and documenting find-
ings, then submitting the results to be reviewed by other subject experts
is irreplaceable. Yet the trend to undermine the scientific method with
pseudoscience persists. The most well-documented examples include
the denial of human-induced global warming, acid rain, the ozone hole,
and the health effects of smoking. Even the revered and long-deceased
scientist-writer Rachel Carson has been under attack by revisionists.