Who Owns Molecular Biology?
By Yarden Katz,
Boston Review
| 10. 28. 2015
Untitled Document
Like much of our society, the American university is increasingly scrutinized through an economic lens. The value of academic research is largely determined by its commercial potential or fundraising capacity. Much has been written about the corrosive effects of this point of view on the humanities, but it has transformed academic science and engineering as well. As Benjamin Ginsberg describes in his book The Fall of the Faculty (2011), universities have been flooded with administrators who view “faculty research mainly as a source of revenue” and “research projects as instruments that generate income.” Yet even the most application-driven universities have always aimed for something beyond enriching their endowment. MIT, for example, declares in its mission statement that it is “committed to generating, disseminating, and preserving knowledge, and to working with others to bring this knowledge to bear on the world’s great challenges,” doing it all “for the betterment of humankind.”
The recent discovery that the CRISPR-Cas system could be used for genome editing illustrates the tension between the corporatization of the university and the pursuit of basic, publicly...
Related Articles
By Alondra Nelson, Science | 09.11.2025
In the United States, the summer of 2025 will be remembered as artificial intelligence’s (AI’s) cruel summer—a season when the unheeded risks and dangers of AI became undeniably clear. Recent months have made visible the stakes of the unchecked use...
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 09.25.2025
In the leadup to the 2024 election, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to make IVF more accessible. He made the commitment central to his campaign, even referring to himself as the “father of IVF.” In his first month in office, Trump issued an executive order promising to expand IVF access. The order set a 90-day deadline for policy recommendations for “lowering costs and reducing barriers to IVF,” although it didn’t make any substantive reproductive healthcare policy changes.
The response to the...
By Johana Bhuiyan, The Guardian | 09.23.2025
In March 2021, a 25-year-old US citizen was traveling through Chicago’s Midway airport when they were stopped by US border patrol agents. Though charged with no crime, the 25-year-old was subjected to a cheek swab to collect their DNA, which...
By Julie Métraux, Mother Jones | 09.23.2025