Biotechnology: Big Money Comes to the University

American universities in the 1980s have witnessed some striking developments at that tender point where academic research meets big business and big government. Some of the most dramatic of these have involved technologies
of genetic engineering—biotechnology, for short—with their much-contested promise to combine extraordinary social benefits with fabulous profits.

At Washington University in St. Louis: The Monsanto Company, in an agreement signed in 1982, channelled 23.5 mi...