The down side to academic patenting of food and agricultural technologies

Janet Rae-Dupree in the New York Times:

The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 started out with the best of intentions. By clearing away the thicket of conflicting rules and regulations at various federal agencies, it set out to encourage universities to patent and license results of federally financed research. For the first time, academicians were able to profit personally from the market transfer of their work. For the first time, academia could be powered as much by a profit motive as by the psychic reward of new discovery.

None of these are necessarily negative outcomes. But more than a quarter-century after President Jimmy Carter signed it into law, the Bayh-Dole Act, sponsored by the former Senators Birch Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, and Robert Dole, Republican of Kansas, is under increasing scrutiny by swelling ranks of critics. The primary concern is that its original intent — to infuse the American marketplace with the fruits of academic innovation — has also distorted the fundamental mission of universities.

The OCM blog adds:

In the same week we read of Monsanto making investments at Iowa State University and the University of Illinois. It's clear that an analysis of Bayh-Dole, aka "University Small Business Patent Procedures Act," needs to occur. And soon, before we further sell out America's longstanding history of reputable public research to the highest bidder. In the Monsanto/University of Illinois venture, the 8 doctorate students will work on Monsanto projects. Monsanto pays for their research fellowships, gets access to all the university infrastructure and facilities, and then gets to release the varieties under its patented control (or perhaps a joint patent with the school).

No Impact Man

I enjoyed this post from No Impact Man.

The Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy

For many, September is the season of returning to school.

This blog grew out of a second-year master's-level course each Fall on "Determinants of U.S. Food Policy," at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. Students and alumni frequently share comments and suggest ideas for posts on this site. Though I don't always mention the connection, this blog also links to things former students are doing elsewhere online. Tufts is a great place for this type of engagement with real-world issues. Other faculty members blog as a form of public communication, and the university has a long-standing commitment to active citizenship.

This year, the first food policy class was today. It is a good time to send some links to interesting sources of news and food policy ideas at the Friedman School. For more information, I have just added a permanent image link in the sidebar to the School's web site.

The school covers a diverse area of work, from community interventions to improve diet and physical activity in the United States to humanitarian work in some of the most challenging settings around the world. For many readers, the most relevant academic areas are the Agriculture, Food, and Environment (AFE) program and the Food Policy and Applied Nutrition (FPAN) program. The FPAN program has a working paper series, including recent research on rethinking food security in humanitarian response (.pdf), a major study on diet diversity (.pdf), and hunger mapping in developing countries (.pdf) (image below). More research from the school can be found on the faculty pages.

A high-profile event at the school each Fall is the Friedman Symposium. This year, the event is scheduled for Sep. 24-26, and will feature former Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman as the keynote speaker. Despite sponsorship from major food companies, the symposium registration is fairly expensive for most people (though a more reasonable $100 for students). Other important annual events include the graduate student research conference, which last Spring drew diverse contributors from 11 universities, and the annual Gershoff Symposium.

Hygiene grade cards for restaurants

We have long been covering the case for hygiene grade cards for restaurants. These grades are a great example of market-oriented information solutions to food safety problems. Part of the appeal is that this information is already generated by local inspectors, so there is no new bureaucracy or work in information generation. All one needs to do is get the information from inspection reports to consumers, so they can defend their own interests in the marketplace. Choices Magazine had a good article on this approach in 2005.

Last month, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) released the results of many months of hard work, requesting information from local inspection offices. The most entertaining passage gives one local agency's explanation for its inability to respond to the advocacy group's request for information:

In one city, a health department employee informed CSPI that there were simply not enough employees in the office to catalog the inspection reports: thousands of reports thus sat untouched in unorganized boxes.

Facebook, targeted ads, and body image

Like many, I am undecided about the role of advertising business models in free web software. The price is right, but is that all that matters? I like Gmail, but it bothers me to see targeted ads based on things I wrote in my non-public correspondence. I have never become addicted to wasting time on Facebook, using a page there mainly as a point of contact for distant friends and colleagues (and as a place to post an RSS feed for U.S. Food Policy). Facebook is good for those uses, but the ads there also seem crude and manipulative. Today, Rachel Beckman in the Washington Post puts the nail in the coffin. The lead sentence is, "My Facebook page called me fat." She describes targeted weight loss ads that prey on women's body image insecurities, based on demographic profile information known to Facebook from their participation in the social networking site.

Jim Hightower talk on Nov. 7 in Massachusetts

Jim Hightower -- the populist writer and speaker, radio personality, and former Commissioner of Agriculture for Texas -- will speak at the Massachusetts Public Health Association's 2008 annual meeting in Marlborough, MA, on Nov. 7, 2008.


Update 9/3/2008: See more coverage of Hightower at Culinate. Right now, I am having fun listening to the audio exerpt clip at Hightower's book site, which describes the Fighting Bob Fest, being held this coming weekend, Sep. 6, 2008, in Baraboo, WI.

Northeast Food and Farm Network

A social networking site with a sustainable agriculture focus in the Northeast.