Comments from Public Meeting in Chicago May 2001 HOBAN - Well, a little bit more of a background is "Why is a land-grant university interested in this topic right now" and as I'll tell you a minute, I have been appointed to chair this task force. Well, in some respects, our future is at stake. If you look at what's happening, there was a lot of news on the internet just about the last few days- there's been fires at the University of Washington -- there's a horticulture research center there. Vandals destroyed a building. There's actually some real threats that are very real to our research enterprise, but also I think if it becomes continually controversial, this could impact our funding, and all these universities building all these biotech centers and great new buildings may have to face some difficult questions from state legislators and others as the controversy heats up. We also need to maintain the appropriate level of support for science and support for agriculture, while at the same time addressing concerns. It's going to be quite a tightrope to walk on all this, because certainly the university is looked to as a source of neutral information, or a source of balanced information, and the good news is the surveys I do, and others do in the US, find that we're still generally trusted by the public. Most consumers would look to the university and even more importantly, the political leaders. I did some interviews recently with food industry leaders and found, for example, the number one source of information they would trust are university scientists. So, in a way, we still have a good deal of credibility here in the US. That's because of our expertise as well as the perception that we work in the public interest. And then finally, as you know, with the land grant system we have a unique and influential interdisciplinary network that really stretches out across the country as well as every county through our extension programs and things like that. So we've really got an ideal delivery mechanism for getting information out and for communicating. And we also know there's a lot going on. Just about every university probably has some programs going on in the way of biotechnology, communication, and things. Certainly, research, there's a lot. So, with that bit of background, that kind of gives you an idea of why last Fall, I was appointed to Chair a task force, and it's being sponsored by ESCOT, primarily, which is the Experiment Station Committee on Organization and Policy, as well as ECOP, the Extension Committee on Organization and Policy. And they've charged me with putting this together and delivering a report and doing a lot of things that this is going to be a major part of. I'm really grateful to have this opportunity and glad that Ralph was encouraging on this, and others have helped to facilitate this happening. I put together a team of what I'm calling 27 "thought leaders"; many names would be well-recognized to you. We span the entire country. We span the range of disciplines. We've got some good thinkers on there, and people are saying "Well, 27 is going to be a pretty unwieldy number. You're not going to coordinate that." Well, I've got a feeling that between a quarter and a half are going to actually do some work. I've been sort of not surprised in my assessment. But the people who are there are doing a lot. We generally, there's not going to be any meetings, we don't have any budget, so we're generally working through the internet and through phone calls, and so on. What I've done is split us into three subcommittees, and I'll show you quickly who's involved with that and what we're doing. First of all, if you want further information on the task force, I tried for a long time to turn that pink letter into blue and could not do it, so you're going to have to put up with the male/female split. The committee, and then you can see our membership on the subcommittees if you're interested, and then also, very importantly, there was a report that the former task force did that I was on which is also on the internet which sort of lays out some of the challenges and opportunities. Ours is really the next step in the process. As a sociologist, it wouldn't be a project without some kind of survey, so we're going to be doing an internet survey. It'll be my first foray into this, and it should hopefully work pretty well. It's being coordinated by Nick Kalanazakis at the University of Missouri, who's already got a very good system set up to do these kind of polls. And we're going to try do a survey, primarily internal. At first, we said "We're going to do everybody. We're going to do farm groups, environmental groups, government leaders, and then we did realize the sort of sticker shock of having no resources for this, so "Why don't we stick with the internal audiences" and we've got a good list of all the deans and other top administrators as well as extension directors, research directors; so those of you in this room who are in that role will be getting an internet survey at some point in the next month or so. Hopefully you'll fill that out and get it back to us. Looking at a whole range of topics, I don't want to over those right now, but some them are actually going to be the same questions that I've asked the food industry leaders as well as things from the consumers and others. Tonight, what our objective is, is really I think to get some more information from you. This is my chance to hear a lot of input from what you might be thinking on the subject. I'll show you in a minute some of the questions. It's kind of like a town hall meeting, if you will, that's why we've got these microphones here. I'd say it's also kind of like a big focus group -- a REAL big focus group. Except we're giving you the refreshments; we're not sitting behind a mirror eating all the refreshments while you talk. I'm going to encourage you to come up to the microphones, and that'll give you an excuse, if you get up and come to the microphone, when you're done you can go back and get another drink and get something to eat too. Hopefully, we'll keep this informal, keep it flowing, identify yourself, because it is being recorded. You won't be quoted in any way, but it'll help me as us as we listen to this and read the transcript, and try to assess what kind of information I've received. What I want to do is now lay out these questions, and then I can be quiet, because I'm hoping there's going to be nice queues at the microphones here. These are the kind of questions we're grappling with right now. Because this is a sensitive area for us, I think this is one of the reasons why the land-grant system, why public universities have taken a while to really get into this topic. Because it's not the easiest thing to wade into, particularly in communicating with the public. So I know that we've got a nice cross-section of folks here, we've got some Ag leaders here, we've got a number of university people, we've got some folks from industry. I think we've got some NGO consumer groups here-- perhaps they were all out on the street, I'm not sure. We certainly would welcome anybody's participation. Let's look at these kind of questions here, and we'll continue popping' the wine, and the bar will stay here as long as people want to drink, I'll stay here as long as people want to talk. What do you see as the roles and responsibilities of the land grant system when it comes to biotechnology communication. I put "and Research" there, but I think in some ways the research one is pretty well-established. We know we're going to do basic applied work, but give us any input you have on research, but particularly on communication. If anybody is kind of familiar with the model that people use for strategic planning, it's called "The SWOT Analysis", that's sort of what I'm looking at here. What are the land grant systems' strengths and weaknesses? What can we do well, what don't we do well, when it comes to biotech communication? And then what are the opportunities and threats that are out there? IF we move into this area, as we start doing more, what are the opportunities? Are there going to be resources for us to garner, but are there threats? And then finally, I think a very important one is How can we maintain our credibility while still supporting science, and still supporting the farm sector? Because in honesty, I understood that part of the reason for this committee, the first task force to be formed, was many of the farm leaders went to the university leaders and said "Listen, we're out there kind of hanging in the wind right now wondering if we'll have a market for our crops. You've encouraged us to adopt these technologies, now why don't you get out there and help us communicate about them?" That's about all I wanted to say, and I'm just encouraging you, there's a couple of microphones up here and don't be shy. I think you've certainly got a wealth of insights and some good ideas, glad to see some of you coming up already. Speaker 1- One of the things I'm curious about, either an opinion or just a concern, would be the credibility of the academicians in the environment of decreasing funding from the government for research, more and more universities are encouraging faculty to get patents, get involved in identifying and patenting their inventions and so forth. Even farming outshoot companies and so on. I'm wondering how much credibility we will have in assessing a technology independently, so to speak. OR even in giving out the results in a proper way, in a neutral manner. HOBAN - That's a great question. Those are the kind of things that we hope to address through our report. I don't want to be in the position of trying to answer for the university system, but you've laid out something very nice, and I think we've got certainly some biotech researchers, I know we've got some university administrators here. That would be another question we could add to our list here. The question was basically how as universities become more involved with doing commercial research, funding from companies, and we get into the whole arena of patenting and owning intellectual property, and so on. How will that influence our ability to be able to actually evaluate a technology and then communicate about the technology. I think that's one that should be up there. SPEAKER 2- I'm a student at Michigan State University in the crop sciences. I'm going to ramble for a minute, because there's a big issue I've seen at this conference and a lot of other things have sort of missed. That is the idea of extension with people who don't work in this area. We have public policy, we have land grant people who are hearing all this stuff, but I don't think it's getting back disseminated to the public. I know as a student, only because I'm in the biotechnology specialization, I hear about this. Other students who are on the farm, going back to sell ag equipment, they don't hear anything about this. They don't know the issues. Consumers in my city, my roommates, I've asked them "What is biotechnology" and they couldn't tell me. They don't even have an idea; they just know it's bad. I think the role of the land grant university is extension as well, and I really don't see that happening, at least in my area, where we're going out into the public. Now some of the students have taken it upon themselves to go into the community- I'm going back to a high school, another student is leading a session at out university - for the area surrounding just our local community, to talk about these issues and to try and show both sides. But I think there's a big group of people, who are the consumers, who are missing out on all this. SPEAKER 3- It's a very down to earth question. Extension has always developed niche products for local farmers, and that was, in fact, one of it's great contributions, is to be able to identify hybrids that would fit very well into the land profile of the immediate area, even on a county by county basis. Many universities in PCR labs have complete facilities for doing generically engineered crops in the same way for local farmers. But you can't do it, because of the barriers to entry. You have to do a humongous expensive field test. As I understand it, those barriers to entry are there for a reason- namely to keep people like you out of competition with larger entities who could pay those upfront costs and then more or less have a monopoly on this technology. Is there any way that land grant colleges can develop specialty crops for local farmers that would give them a really economic boost without facing this inordinate hurdle of having to do what most people in this room would recognize as an utterly fatuous and unnecessary field test? SPEAKER 3 - At ten million dollars a shot for a field test to show that it's not going to destroy the structure of the county, I don't know how you're going to do that, but that's what our regulations would seem to require. This is a tremendous burden or barrier to the usual work of the extension, I would think. SPEAKER 4 - To address that last point, I know many people in the audience already know this, but there's a group of universities and the USDA who are trying to put together a group like the IR4 project (that's looking at pesticide regulations on small orphan crops) that uses the same thing with transgenic application of transgenic to small orphan orphan crops that are below the radar screen of many of these biotech companies. I don't know how far this has gone, but people are looking into that. SPEAKER 5- Cooperative extension has always traditionally played a two-way communication window, so to speak, and I think that we could have a better role in listening to what the consumer says, I think that's a large silent majority of consumers, and I think right now scientists and the corporations are listening to the environmental, really vocal groups and thinking that they represent all consumers, and in fact, I think that they don't. So I think one of the roles that the land-grant universities can play through cooperative extension is listening to that silent majority and giving them a voice and taking that back to the scientific community and saying "These are the issues that you really need to address and the concerns that people have" and I think that if you can facilitate that dialog, a real dialog, instead of discounting what people say… SPEAKER 6 - I am with the Center for Science and Public Interest. I have a couple of comments. One, I think that the land-grant universities and the scientists at those universities need to become more public advocates of the technology. I think that one of the things that I've learned in the last couple days is from history hast taught us is that public wants to know more scientific facts, and they want to know them truthfully. They want to know both the benefits and the risks. And right now, what congress hears, what the public hears, tends to be the extremes. The scientists who have been paid by industry, the industry scientists, or some of the, on the left side, those scientists. And I think that the land-grant universities, are positioned, and the scientists there, are positioned to play a moderate role, to have some credibility, that can use that credibility to be a, to provide a position that is balanced. That explains some of the risks, explains some of the benefits about the technology. So I guess I would advocate for a stronger role as an advocate of the technology. A second point, I would say, is that we also hear a lot about what Monsanto's doing, we hear about the five major crops, we hear about the research and the applications that are going on by the big companies. We don't hear a lot about the research that's going on in the universities. I know a lot of it gets published in very technical scientific journals, but I think it might be a challenge to try to figure out ways to disseminate that information so that the public understands the breadth of agricultural biotechnology, the breadth of the kinds of research that's being done, the potential benefits that might occur, the potential crops that are being, that research is being done upon, the solutions that scientists are trying to find, the problems that scientists are trying to find solutions for. So I think that might be a challenge, is to figure out a way to present the research, not in the journal form, but in another form that the public, congress, other people who need to make policy decisions can understand a little better. And the third thing is, we've heard a lot the last couple days about the Intellectual Property (IP) system, and the universities are a part of that IP system, and I think people are beginning to question that IP system, or figure out ways to deal with the IP system to make it more manageable for developing countries, for people who want to do research on things, and I think it would be something that the universities should think about, and see if there are ways that we can simplify the IP system, or allow it to, more technology transfer from that system. SPEAKER 7- I'm at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln, I just became the Director of the Center for Biotechnology. And I've trying to think of ways to engage the public in the discussion of what biotechnology is all about. First of all, I view biotech on logy as including medical and agricultural. And so, it's the intersection of all the basic research areas that come together to create researchers who can do biotechnology. One idea was based on the NIH's movies- Summer at the Movies, where they do different science movies and then they have a public discussion, so there'll be a scientist at the end who discusses the quality of the science presented in the movie. For instance, Jurassic Park. When that came out, there was a lot of interest in that, "Can that be done" and "Can people clone dinosaurs?" The public wants to know that, and so you could have somebody who's cloned something from some ancient material, some fossil, perhaps. But from the University of Nebraska- Lincoln. And we don't have anybody who does that there, but there could be other things, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which was about extending life, preventing aging. There are people at the University of Nebraska who work on aging. Frankenstein, same type of idea. And these are movies, this is the public's entree to science, this is where they encounter it, and these are frightening images. So I think it would be great to have a scientist at the end, available to discuss the quality of the science, what's being done today, and then to be able to answer questions from the public. And then one way to engage the city leaders would be to have the movies introduced by some of the community leaders. SPEAKER 8 - I am from the University of Melbourne in Australia. I wanted to make the point that we could spend a great deal of time, you've called this a Town Hall Meeting, but it's not you know, it's a highly focused meeting. It's a group of stakeholders, and I think your efforts in your land-grant colleges would be better addressed to producing stakeholder focus for whatever you say. And I wonder whether there's a good, well-developed cooperative farming groups throughout the country, because these are the people whom you have to address. And I understand that the organic farming group has many such cooperatives, and I think it's important, as was made many times during the last couple of days, that the benefits which we see clearly for the environment are quite clearly enunciated to these groups. Because they simply cannot claim the high moral ground, when in fact the GM staff is doing that job, and is demonstrably capable of doing so, and we have the data. And I think that's something organic farming is a bit light on, to say the least, and some of the environmental experiments, as reported, that bloody monarch butterfly stuff, what a load of old cods. It really was the most awful science that you can imagine, and people bloody believed it. And you've just got to get up there and say that's not true. And so that, I think it's important that the focus of your efforts is to groups where you're really going to make some impression. SPEAKER 9 - I am with the Natural Resources, Canada. Actually, Mark Sears at the University of Guelph is doing a great study on the monarch butterfly, if you'd like the REAL science on that. I just wanted to make a comment based on the very first comment that was addressed here. The credibility of universities is based on your independence, your independence in research, your independence in science. And once you lose that, you lose your credibility. And this is true throughout the world- the surveys that have been done in Canada and in the US and in Europe show that university scientist have the greatest credibility because of their independence. And unfortunately, a lot of science now has to be funded through other sources like industry and our scientists at universities get funding through industry, so I think that it's very important on the one hand, to make sure that you acknowledge that your science is independent research although you're being funded by private industry, your goals in the science and how you're doing your science is not dictated by the industry even though you've got their money. SPEAKER 10 - I am with the Ontario Federation of Agriculture. I've noticed over the last two days that al lot of the things I've been hearing come down to basic PR101. You're talking about communication, honesty, you're talking about listening, and I've learned a lot in the last couple of days and hearing what the other side has been saying, even though it's been through role-playing. That got pretty interesting. Anyway, you're SWOT analysis and so forth and so on, I wish I had answers for all that stuff, but I'm thinking that your universities, your colleges must have communication disciplines? Are you making use of your grad students or your.. I mean, they're trained in all this stuff. You're rolling out experts in your very own colleges and universities who are trained to do this sort of stuff and come up with strategic analysis, situation analysis, they could put together communications plans for you that would meet all this business about honesty and transparency and.. you have the expertise right at your fingertips. I know you're cross-disciplining with the other sciences, but if you use your communications people, they might be invaluable in this area. I went through a communications program at one of our colleges in Ottawa, two years, full time, and then found out that our college wasn't actually following what they were teaching. They're getting better, but they were teaching this course, and they were paying people to tell us how to do it, but they weren't doing it themselves. When the ice storm hit, they didn't have a communications plan in place. And on top of that, with this stuff you could also have a crisis plan put in place, because those wrinkles that we were talking about earlier. Something sooner or later will probably go wrong, and it's going to hit the fan, and if you have a communications plan in place immediately to deal with that, who talks to the med… Oh that's another thing you could do, and you may already be doing it, is talk to your opinion leaders in the media. Go around and talk to the editorial boards. You may already be doing that, I don't know. But , don't wait for a crisis in the media to go in and correct something, educate them ahead of time in a very relaxed way, and just feed them little bits at a time. There's just a mountain of things you can do in the communications area that you have people already trained that will help you with that. SPEAKER 11- Well, this is a word from the trenches, to sort of answer that. I'm a biotechnology communicator. I'm from Oregon State University. And just what I'm most finding as I'm out there is one that's already been mentioned, is that "Oh, well you're all in bed with industry anyway. Universities are." I realize that maybe Berkeley and Novartis have a really good thing going, but the rest of us aren't all benefiting that much. But it's pointing back on all of us, that we have to find an answer to that. The second thing is, the toughest group I've gone to talk to, and I've talked to many kinds of groups, is the organic growers. And one thing took my by surprise that I may want to list up there as one of the threats or one of the weaknesses, is I expected them to be radically against genetically engineered foods because they see that as a threat to their systems, for whatever reasons. But the thing that was interesting is that they also feel that the land grant universities are their advisory. And that was a real surprise to me. I think that's something we need to work on, we need to develop a dialog and we need to find a way to connect to that community. SPEAKER 12 - I'm with North Dakota State University Extension Service, and I have three points that have somewhat been covered related to the land grant's role dealing with this issue. First of all, I think it IS our role to help facilitate good public dialog around an issue like this. That will evolve into good public policy that we can utilize to move forward with. We have a reputation that may be tainted at times, but our history and what we do today still puts an unbiased source of information as to reputation on the land grant system. I think that's one of the niches that we carry, and consequently we could be a key player in helping to facilitate this dialog because of that history and that reputation. I think we also have a role to play in providing good educational support on the science behind this technology. Not only through our adult education programs within the extension system but also to post-secondary, elementary, and secondary school teachers as well. I think the land grant system could play a really important role in that as well. And the third point, I really believe that new technology, whether it's in this field or others, is part of the role, the development of new technology, is part of the role of the land grant system. In highly recognizing that that probably won't take place with us doing it in isolation, but with us doing it in partnership with the private sector. I think as long as we can maintain a focus on developing technologies that have the public good in mind, rather than the benefit and the profit of the private sector, I really believe that's where the land grant system can make a difference. SPEAKER 13 - I'm from Perdue University. This is an excellent forum. But I would like to make the comment that I think we're on a fairly slippery slope here. And as I look at our mission in land grant universities, we really have two main ones that deal with this issue. First of all, the research side. The research aspect of what we do is not to give recommendations. It is not to support something or not support it. IT's to provide unbiased factual information and then allow those who receive that information to make an informed decision based on those facts. The recommendation side of what we do comes from the cooperative extension service. And recommendations out of extension come from already proven science based on demonstrations for local areas. And we can make recommendations on already proven science and proven technologies. And so we have on the one hand to provide unbiased information WITHOUT making a recommendation and say we support that you do this to a farmer, to whatever. Balanced with already proven science on the extension side. I'm not sure what we're asking us to do here, are we asking the research side to come out in support and advocate GMO technology, or are we asking the extension side to make a recommendation based on proven technology? I'm not sure with GMOs, I'm not sure we're at the point yet where we have the proven science and the proven technology to make recommendations. So we're trying to balance research, where we shouldn't make recommendations, just provide facts, and then coming out in support in and advocating some particular technology. I see it as a fairly slippery slope that we're on. SPEAKER 14 - I work at Calgene, but I also have the perspective of working with the cooperative extension service at UC-Davis as a Dairy Farm Advisor at the county level for a couple of years. With that background, I guess, we've heard mentioned here a couple of times that we really only need one more monarch butterfly to happen or stalling to occur for us to have real issues with regard to the acceptance of biotech food. We've heard a lot of discussion of biotech plants at this particular meeting and the acceptance of crops etc, but one thing I've seen lacking is any discussion of transgenic animals. If you want to get emotional, let's talk about putting genes into fluffy little calves, or fish for that matter, and so I think that one of the areas that really should be addressed is: Let's get the consumer informed about the fact that transgenic animals do exist right now, and what they're purpose is so that they don't get blindsided like they did with transgenic crops when it was already at 50% implementation and they felt like they didn't know that was coming. And so I would really recommend that we have some biotech extension in the animal science area. The other thing that I think that is inherent in the land grant education system doing education in biotechnology is that that costs money, and yet where should that money come from whilst maintaining some sort of objective stance. So I don't think that cooperative extension can ever be in the position of taking money from industry, and yet at some level I think that this was something that industry would support in, when the education that's going out there is objective data about biotechnology. I wonder if there isn't a way that industry money could be utilized without having any say whatsoever as to how that money is utilized in support of extension's mission. I think that biotech companies support the concept of cooperative extension, teaching objective information about biotechnology. SPEAKER 15 - I am from Oregon State University. This is particularly for the people in the Midwest that have a lot of biotechnology crops right now, to start long term studies, particularly the ecological impacts and effects of GMO crops on farm and production systems that we have. The first of those studies was just reported in Nature several weeks ago in the UK. And that kind of thing will need to be done here as well, to see how these things develop over the next decade. UK study covered just about 10 years. To see how these crops develop over the next decade or two, so we can plot our future very effectively. SPEAKER 16 - Why should this technology be any different than the other technologies that land grant universities, through their research, their extension and their teaching programs, have dealt with in the past? Your questions are good questions, but we're not in support or not in support of a technology, we're in the knowledge business. We should generate our knowledge through research, we should make sure it's transferred through our extension programs, and make sure that our curriculums are relevant so that this knowledge can be obtained by the young people. SPEAKER 17- I'd just like to make a comment on the previous gentleman's comment related to long term studies, which I think is right on track. I think one of the problems we're facing though with a large portion of our funding coming from state government, the issues they want us to address are issues today that they want corrected tomorrow and we have a real challenge looking at focusing our research on long term basic research issues that this type of approach would take. And I really think it may be the role of our federal partner, with the funding that goes through the land grant, to give leadership to the notion that we need to start focusing more attention on the long term ramifications, environmental, social, and so forth, of this technology. Here again, I think it's a challenge for us at the state level because of the mindset that we have with our funders, a two-year legislature, they want results next year. We find ourselves doing a lot of applied research and not as much basic research as is needed. SPEAKER 18 - The comment is that I've been in biotechnology for about 20 years now, and spent a great deal of time working in something called "bovine somatotropin", and now working with crops. My comment is about long-term studies. My experience says that the proper length of a long term study is the longest study that's ever been run, plus some additional amount of time to make sure that we're all satisfied. You have to really get back to the risks and the benefits and not just simply talk about long term studies. Two suggestions. The first suggestion is that one of the things that the land grant universities could do to help move biotechnology to wherever it's going is to be a bit more integrated. One of the things that's very frustrating for us in industry is to talk with the folks who are working on improving, or inserting and improving any, inserting a gene and improving a particular plant, and then talking with the animal science folks saying "Is this an attribute which would actually be useful" for the poultry, for the swine, for whatever. So getting an integrated thought process going within each of the universities so that you're thinking along the lines of a nutritional project from seed through to improving the efficiency of production at the lnad grant universities would be a very interesting and useful, I believe. And the other point that I'd like to make is that a bit of education in the world of the politics associated with world trade would also be very useful in helping people to understand why some of the decisions are made and the positions are taken according to where people on this planet live. There are decisions that are made that maybe cloaked in science which are not necessarily actually based upon science. SPEAKER 20 - I am with the Hudson Institute. Concerning transgenic animals I think it shows part of the real problem here when I ask people about dolly why was dolly cloned I find that time and again they don't know. Usually the answer is why did the mountain climber climb the mountain because its there, somebody wanted to be the first to clone They don't know that dolly was cloned because dolly was a transgenic sheep that she carries in her milk is a protein which the only way to produce this protein basically in large amounts is in milk and this is a protein that they think will combat sis tic fibrosis which is a horrible disease which there's no cure. That's why we got the first cloned animal the very first animal were transgenic mice that have been tremendously valuable in cancer research why because we've given them immune systems somewhat more like human beings and somewhat less like mice. The Canadian company became the first to clone goats why? to become the first to clone goats no. They clone the gats and again it was like dolly you can't just take an animal make it transgenic and breed it and keep that trade they were special goats that were made transgenic to produce in their milk spider silk and the spider silk is going to be the worlds strongest material its going to be wonderful for sutures for other wounds, actually for body armor, for policeman. This is what we should be talking about, we shouldn't be afraid. The transgenic animals are not a liability they shouldn't be. On the other hand in New Zealand when some people wanted to go forward using transgenic cows, making transgenic cows, by inserting a human gene or to were essentially stopped at least they were stopped last I heard by a lot of people saying its unnatural to put a human gene into a cow, well these cows were supposed to produce proteins in their milk to fight multiple sclerosis, and they were stopped by it's not God's will stuff, its not natural and by golly my answer to that is your right its not natural, multiple sclerosis is about as natural as you can get, having a cure for multiple sclerosis is darned unnatural, but this is what transgenic animals can mean for us. The very fact that probably a lot of people in this room haven't heard about these things I think is very telling the word isn't getting out about transgenic animals the word isn't getting out about what transgenic plants can do and I think the words need to get out at the same time. I think the very same scientist, they can't be isolated. Biotech is Biotech. And I think when scientists vaunt a new Biotech drug they ought to say that, that Biotech everywhere needs to advance, what kind of society are we where virtually all of our insolent that we put directly into our blood is recombinant 100% recombinant and yet if less than 1% of your soybeans or your corn or your rice were combatant we have to dress up like monarch butterflies like Frankenstein's monster to protest it We're all a big family here when it comes to biotech, the medicine people, the animal people, the crop people. Even bio- remediation cleaning up waste sites using plants. We're all one big family, we need to basically realize that if we don't all hang together as Ben Franklin said, We may all hang separately. SPEAKER 22- I just want to bring us back to that last point. There had been several comments made about advocacy and in general we are about knowledge in the university. But we could argue about a specific definition of advocacy but certainly our extension programs and our outreach programs from our research faculty have incorporated a certain element of advocacy. Integrated pest management comes to mind, certainly we have been strong advocates of the technologists of integrated pest management and of new furor is that we felt had merit, so I think this is an important point. The other point I want to make is since the biro lack of the 1970's or whenever, I think we have a lot of challenges coming with our credibility a number of speakers have referred to the fact that surveys have shown universities scientists still are very high in the publics eye in terms of credibility. I think that credibility, and it will probably take years, but over time that credibility can wither. As faculty members become owners of the technology and then once we become owners of the technology and beneficiaries of the technology our " advocacy ", becomes discreditable, and so I think that's an important point that we need to address and the Land Grant Universities particularly in the research and experiment station extension programs, how are we going to maintain credibility remaining as advocates at the same time being owners of the technology we're advocating. SPEAKER 23 - I am with the University of Illinois. I wanted to share a little educational experience that I had that adds another dimension to this complex issue of University industry relationships. I attended the bio meetings in Boston about a year ago that's the bio technology industrial organizational. That organization I think at their first meeting had somewhere between 4 and 5 thousand people, most of those folks were representatives of the pharmaceutical industry. At the second meeting they had seven thousand, at the meeting that I attended they expected nine thousand and had ninety six hundred or so, and again this year they expect to exceed 10 or maybe even 12 thousand people so it's a very rapidly growing organization. They had presentations of mostly by the private sector not entirely because several of the Universities are not only land grants but others are associate members of bio. Many other presentations, in fact I was amazed at the number of speakers who after they gave their presentation made a pitch for the continuing increase of the national Institutes of Health budget, research budget which as some of you know will probably go over 20 billion dollars this year with the proposed increase and that proposed increase is larger than the entire USDA research budget, they are in a five year effort to double that budget and the principle supporters are of course the members of the pharmaceutical industry. And that's not just a few big firms because increasingly the big pharmaceutical firms are outsourcing their research enrollment programs but they love the National Institutes of Health Research budget because it funds outstanding researchers its very competitive its very oriented toward excellence and productivity, the Institutions higher people and compete for people who are able to compete for National Institutes of health grants. Including agricultural institutes, a large number of the presentations at that meeting actually bridged the gap between the farmer industry and agriculture because increasingly they see the potential for producing pharmaceuticals instead of in bacterial systems, in milk, egg whites, and particularly plants which don't harbor the same viruses that animals do that can end as contaminants in vaccines and other pharmaceuticals. If in fact the National Institutes of Health Science Research budget exceeds thirty billion dollars and they're even planning for another five year period of attempting to double it, its important to get a perspective on what that means. The Department of defense, my figure may be a little out of date but, the Department of Defense Research budget is about forty four billion dollars and that's roughly a third of the total research both public and private of the nation. But of that forty four billion only six billion or less some people say two billion is really what you would call basic research, so the National Institute of health support more basic research by far than any other agency or group both public or private, and that will have a profound effect on composition of faculties throughout the Nation because those Institutions that want to be important research institutions including the egg parts of those institutions will want to populate they're faculty with a lot of people who can compete for those kinds of funds and I think it represents an opportunity because of the close relationships between agriculture and pharmacy that it also presents some challenges with regard to all the other subject matter that we need to deal with.