The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [52]
The remarkable commercial potential of recombinant DNA technology has recently prompted a debate within the scientific community over precisely the issues of gifts, commodities, and the goals of science. Not only have many academic biochemists been drawn into the marketplace and ceased to treat their ideas as gifts, but several academic institutions have considered following suit. In the fall of 1980, for example, Harvard University announced a proposal to found a university-related corporation to exploit the gene-splicing technology developed by its faculty. The idea was opposed (and eventually rejected) on several grounds, a primary one being the conflict between the need for secrecy in commercial ventures and the free exchange of ideas to which the academy is dedicated. As a geneticist at MIT, Dr. Jonathan Kind, remarked: “In the past one of the strengths of American bio-medical science was the free exchange of materials, strains of organisms and information … But now, if you sanction and institutionalize private gain and patenting of microorganisms, then you don’t send out your strains because you don’t want them in the public sector. That’s already happening now. People are no longer sharing their strains of bacteria and their results as freely as they did in the past.”
Here we may revise my remarks on the connection between freedom and the marketplace. Free-market ideology addresses itself to the freedom of individuals, and from the point of view of the individual there often is a connection between freedom and commodities. But the story changes when approached from the point of view of the group. A gift community puts certain constraints on its members, yes, but these constraints assure the freedom of the gift. “Academic freedom,” as the term is used in the debate over commercial science, refers to the freedom of ideas, not to the freedom of individuals. Or perhaps we should say that it refers to the freedom of individuals to have their ideas treated as gifts contributed to the group mind and therefore the freedom to participate in that mind. The issue arises because when all ideas carry a price, then all discussion, the cognition of the group mind, must be conducted through the mechanisms of the market which—in this case, at least—is a very inefficient way to hold a discussion. Ideas do not circulate freely when they are treated as commodities. The magazine Science reported on a case in California in which one DNA research group sought to patent a technique that other local researchers had treated as common property, as “under discussion.” An academic scientist who felt his contribution had been exploited commented, “There used to be a good, healthy exchange of ideas and information among [local] researchers … Now we are locking our doors.” In a free market the people are free, the ideas are locked up.
There are forms of organization other than the one that follows a circulation of gifts. The military is highly organized. So is General Motors. One could develop a “contractual” theory of the organization of science which would assert that scientists are motivated by the desire for power and money, that they do research and publish in order to attract these rewards from whoever it is—the company, the consumer, the government—that hands out the jobs and the cash. Such a reward system leads to its own sort of group. But in science, at least, as Hagstrom points out, it is precisely when people work with no goal other than that of attracting a better job, or getting tenure or higher rank, that one finds specious and trivial research, not contributions to knowledge. When there is a marked competition for jobs and money, when such supposedly secondary